^BB 

JNIVERSITY  OF  CA  RIVERSIDE.  L  BRARY 


3  1210018390334 


THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 

OF  CALIFORNIA 

RIVERSIDE 


HENRY  JAMES 


HENRY  JAMES 


By 
REBECCA  WEST 


NEW  YORK 

HENRY  HOLT  AND  COMPANY 


W47 


Firit  PuMshtd  in  Hrt 


AUTHOR'S  NOTE 

I  wish  to  acknowledge  my  indebtedness  for  "help  in 
compiling  the  bibliography  to  Mr  James  B.  Pinker, 
Miss  Wilma  Meikle,  and  Messrs  Constable ;  and  to 
Messrs  Macmillan  for  the  loan  of  the  New  York 
Edition  of  the  Novels  and  Tales  of  Henry  James. 

E.  W. 


•4.  Adult 
enfc 


CONTENTS 

MM 

I.  THE  SOURCES 9 

II.  THE  INTERNATIONAL  SITUATION    .        .  24 

III.  TRANSITION 55 

IV.  THE  CRYSTAL  BOWL    ....  86 
V.  THE  GOLDEN  BOWL     ....  105 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 119 

AMERICAN  BIBLIOGRAPHY     ,       .       .124 

INDEX .    127 


THE  SOUKCES 

AT  various  times  during  the  latter  half 
of  the  eighteenth  century  there 
crossed  the  Atlantic  two  Protestant 
Irishmen,  a  Lowland  Scotsman,  and  an 
Englishman,  and  thereby  they  fixed  the 
character  of  Mr  Henry  James'  genius.  For 
the  essential  thing  about  Mr  James  was  that 
he  was  an  American ;  and  that  meant,  for 
his  type  and  generation,  that  he  could  never 
feel  at  home  until  he  was  in  exile.  He  came 
of  a  stock  that  was  the  product  of  culture  and 
needed  it  as  part  of  its  environment.  But 
at  the  time  of  his  childhood  and  youth — he 
was  born  in  1843 — culture  was  a  thing  that 
was  but  budding  here  and  there  in  America, 
in  such  corners  as  were  not  being  used  in  the 
business  of  establishing  the  material  civilisa- 
tion of  the  new  country.  The  social  life  of 
old  New  York  and  Boston  had  its  delicacy, 
9 


HENRY  JAMES 


its  homespun  honesty  of  texture,  its  austerer 
sort  of  beauty;  but  plainly  the  American 
people  were  too  preoccupied  by  their  busi- 
nesses and  professions  to  devote  their  money 
to  the  embellishment  of  salons  or  their 
intelligence  to  the  development  of  manners. 
Hawthorne  and  Emerson  and  Margaret 
Fuller  and  their  friends  were  trying  to  make 
a  culture  against  time;  but  any  record  of 
their  lives  which  gives  a  candid  account  of 
how  desperately  these  people  had  to  struggle 
to  make  the  meanest  living  shows  that  the 
poor  American  ants  were  then  utterly  unable 
to  form  the  leisured  community  which  is  the 
necessary  environment  for  grasshoppers. 
"  The  impression  of  Emerson's  personal 
history  is  condensed  into  the  single  word 
Concord,"  wrote  Mr  James  later,  "  and  all 
the  condensation  in  the  world  will  not  make 
it  rich."  There  was  no  blinking  the  fact 
that  in  attempting  to  set  up  in  this  unfinished 
country  Art  was  like  a  delicate  lady  who 
moves  into  a  house  before  the  plaster  is  dried 
on  the  walls ;  she  was  bound  to  lead  an 
invalid  existence. 

10 


THE  SOURCES 


This  incapacity  of  America  to  supply  the 
colour  of  life  became  obvious  to  Henry  and 
William  James,  the  two  charming  little  boys 
in  tight  trousers  and  brass-buttoned  jackets, 
one  of  whom  grew  up  to  write  fiction  aa 
though  it  were  philosophy  and  the  other  to 
write  philosophy  as  though  it  were  fiction, 
at  a  very  early  age.  It  did  not  escape  their 
infant  observation  that  the  ladies  and  gentle- 
men who  fascinated  them  by  dancing  on  the 
tight-rope  at  Barnum's  Museum  always  bore 
exotic  names,  and  when  they  grew  older  and 
developed  the  youthful  taste  for  anecdotic 
art  they  found  it  could  be  gratified  only 
by  such  European  importations  as  Thor- 
waldsen's  Christ  and  His  Disciples,  the 
great  white  images  of  which  were  ranged 
round  the  maroon  walls  of  the  New  York 
Crystal  Palace,  or  Benjamin's  Hay  don' a 
pictures  in  the  Diisseldorf  collection  in 
Broadway.  And  when  they  grew  older  still 
and  began  to  show  a  fine  talent  for  painting 
and  drawing  their  unfolding  artistic  sense 
found  more  and  more  intimations  of  the 
wonder  of  Europe.  A  View  of  Tuscany 
11 


HENKY  JAMES 


that  hung  in  the  Jameses'  home  was  pro- 
nounced by  a  friend  who  had  lived  much  in 
Italy  not  to  be  of  Tuscany  at  all.  Colours 
in  Tuscany  were  softer ;  but  such  brightness 
might  be  found  in  other  parts  of  Italy.  So 
Europe  was  as  various  as  that — a  place  of 
innumerable  changing  glories  like  a  sunrise, 
but  better  than  a  sunrise,  inasmuch  as  every 
glory  was  encrusted  with  the  richness  of 
legend. 

But  most  powerful  of  all  influences  that 
made  the  Jameses  rebel  against  the  narrow- 
ness of  Broadway  and  the  provincial  spare- 
ness  of  the  old  New  York,  which  must  have 
been  something  like  a  neat  virgin  Blooms- 
bury,  was  their  father.  The  Eeverend 
Henry  James  was  wasted  on  young  America ; 
it  had  developed  neither  the  creative  stream 
that  would  have  inspired  him  nor  the  in- 
tellectual follies  that  he  could  slay  with  that 
beautiful  wit  which  made  him  one  of  the 
great  letter-writers  of  the  world.  "  Carlyle 
is  the  same  old  sausage,  fizzing  and  sputter- 
ing in  his  own  grease,  only  infinitely  more 
unreconciled  to  the  blest  Providence  which 
12 


THE  SOURCES 


guides  human  affairs.  He  names  God  fre- 
quently and  alludes  to  the  highest  things  as 
if  they  were  realities,  but  all  only  as  for  a 
picturesque  effect,  so  completely  does  he 
seem  to  regard  them  as  habitually  circum- 
vented and  set  at  naught  by  the  politicians." 
The  man  who  could  write  that  should 
have  been  a  strong  and  salutary  influence 
on  English  culture,  and  he  knew  it.  It  is 
probable  that  when  he  and  his  wife  paid 
what  Mr  James  tells  us  was  their  "  first  (that 
is  our  mother's  first)  visit  to  Europe,  which 
had  quite  immediately  followed  my  birth, 
which  appears  to  have  lasted  some  year  and 
a  half" — the  last  clause  of  this  sentence  is 
unfortunate  for  a  novelist  famous  for  his 
deliberation — he  brought  his  babies  with  him 
with  a  solemnity  of  intention,  as  if  to  dip 
them  in  a  holy  well.  Thus  it  was  that  the 
little  Jameses  not  only  bore  themselves 
proudly  through  their  childhood  as  became 
those  who  had  lived  as  babies  in  Piccadilly, 
and  read  Punch  with  a  proprietary  instinct, 
but  were  also  possessed  in  spirit  by  some- 
thing that  was  more  than  the  discontent 
13 


HENRY  JAMES 


with  the  flatness  of  daily  life  and  the  desire 
for  a  brighter  scene  that  comes  to  the  ordin- 
ary child.  From  their  father's  preoccupa- 
tion they  gained  a  rationalised  consciousness 
that  America  was  an  incomplete  environ- 
ment, that  in  Europe  there  were  many 
mines  of  treasure  which  they  must  find 
and  rifle  if  they  hoped  for  the  health 
of  their  minds  and  the  salvation  of  their 
souls. 

In  1855,  when  Henry  James  was  twelve, 
the  family  yielded  to  its  passion  and  crossed 
the  Atlantic.  The  following  four  years  were 
of  immense  importance  to  Mr  James,  and 
consequently  to  ourselves,  for  he  had  been 
born  with  a  mind  that  received  impressions 
as  if  they  had  been  embraces  and  remem- 
bered them  with  as  fierce  a  leaping  of  the 
blood ;  just  as  his  brother  William's  mind 
acquired  and  created  systems  of  thought  as 
joyously  as  other  men  like  meeting  friends 
and  establishing  a  family.  He  found  London 
in  the  main  jolly,  rather  ugly,  but  comfort- 
able and  full  of  character,  just  as  he  had  seen 
it  in  Punch ,  but  here  and  there  detected — 
14 


THE  SOURCES 


notably  on  a  drive  from  London  Bridge — 
black  outcrops  of  Hogarth's  London.  "  It 
was  a  soft  June  evening,  with  a  lingering 
light  and  swarming  crowds,  as  they  then 
seemed  to  me,  of  figures  reminding  me  of 
George  Cruikshank's  Artful  Dodger  and  his 
Bill  Sykes  and  his  Nancy,  only  with  the 
bigger  brutality  of  life,  which  pressed  upon 
the  cab,  the  Early  Victorian  four-wheeler, 
as  we  jogged  over  the  Bridge,  and  cropped 
up  in  more  and  more  gas-lit  patches  for  all 
our  course,  culminating,  somewhere  far  to 
the  west,  in  the  vivid  picture,  framed  by  the 
cab  window,  of  a  woman  reeling  backward 
as  a  man  felled  her  to  the  ground  with  a  blow 
in  the  face."  He  knew  Paris,  then  being 
formed  by  the  free  flourish  of  Baron  Hauss- 
mann  into  its  present  splendours  of  wide 
regularity,  yet  still  homely  with  remnants 
of  the  dusty  ruralism  of  its  pre-Napoleonic 
state;  he  saw  all  the  pretty  show  of  the 
Second  Empire,  he  stood  in  the  Champs- 
Elysees  and  watched  the  baby  Prince 
Imperial  roll  by  to  St.  Cloud  with  his  escort 
of  blue  and  silver  cent-gardes ;  and  the 
15 


HENKY  JAMES 


Galerie  d'Apollon  in  the  Louvre,  its  floors 
gleaming  with  polished  wood,  its  walls 
glowing  with  masterpieces,  and  its  pro- 
portions awesomely  interminable  and  soar- 
ing, was  the  scene  of  his  young  imaginative 
life.  Those  were  the  great  places ;  but  there 
were  also  Geneva  and  Boulogne  and  Zurich 
and  Bonn,  the  differences  of  which  he 
savoured,  and  above  all  the  richness  of 
desultory  contact  with  arts  and  persons  of 
the  various  countries.  He  gaped  at  the 
exquisiteness  of  ugly  Rose  Cheri  at  the 
Gymnase,  copied  Delacroix,  read  Evan 
Harrington  as  it  came  out  in  Once  a 
Week ;  was  at  school  with  a  straight- 
nosed  boy  called  Henry  Houssaye  and  a 
snub-nosed  boy  called  Coquelin;  waa 
tutored  by  Robert  Thompson,  the  famous 
Edinburgh  teacher  who  was  afterwards  to 
instruct  Robert  Louis  Stevenson  and  many 
other  eminent  Scots  in  Jacobite  sympathies 
as  well  as  the  more  usual  subjects,  and  by 
M.  Lerambert  whose  verse  had  been  praised 
by  Sainte-Beuve  in  his  Causeries.  "  Im- 
pressions," writes  Mr  James  of  this  period, 
16 


THE  SOURCES 


"  were  not  merely  all  right  but  were  the 
dearest  things  in  the  world." 

And  one  must  remember  that  not  only 
were  impressions  much  to  young  Henry 
James,  they  were  all  he  had.  His  mental 
life  consisted  of  nothing  else.  His  natural 
inaptitude  for  acquiring  systematised  know- 
ledge was  probably  intensified  by  the  study 
of  foreign  languages  entailed  by  this  travel ; 
for  if  a  child  spends  its  time  learning  several 
systems  of  naming  things  it  plainly  has  less 
energy  to  spare  for  learning  systems  of 
arranging  things.  At_any  rate  his  inability 
to  grasp  the  elements  of  arithmetic  and 
mathematics  led  to  his  removal  from  the 
Polytechnic  School  at  Zurich,  and  was  the 
cause  of  despair  in  all  his  tutors.  But  most 
minds,  however  incapable  they  may  be  of 
following  the  exact  sciences  or  speculative 
thought,  have  some  sort  of  idea  of  the  system 
of  the  universe  inserted  into  them  by  early 
instruction  in  one  or  other  of  the  religious 
faiths.  This  unifying  influence  was  refused 
to  Henry  James  by  the  circumstance  that 
his  father  had  found  certain  religious  doubts 

B  17 


HENRY  JAMES 


that  had  almost  driven  him  from  the  ministry 
solved  in  the  works  of  Swedeuborg,  which  he 
found  not  at  all  incredible  but— as  he  once 
said  in  a  phrase  that  showed  him  his  son's 
own  father — fairly  "  insipid  with  veracity." 
On  this  foundation  of  Swedenborgianism  he 
had  built  up  for  himself  a  religion  which  was 
"  nothing  if  not  a  philosophy,  extraordin- 
arily complex  and  worked  out  and  original, 
intensely  personal  as  an  exposition,  yet  not 
only  susceptible  of  application,  but  clamor- 
ous for  it,  to  the  whole  field  of  consciousness, 
nature  and  society,  history,  knowledge,  all 
human  relations  and  questions,  every  pulse 
of  the  process  of  our  destiny."  This  was  no 
playground  for  the  young  intelligence,  so 
young  Henry  James  was  told  to  prepare 
himself  by  drinking  from  such  springs  as 
seemed  to  him  refreshing.  When  he  was 
asked  to  what  church  he  went  he  was  bidden 
by  his  father  to  reply  that  "  we  could  plead 
nothing  less  than  the  whole  privilege  of 
Christendom,  and  that  there  was  no  com- 
munion, even  that  of  the  Catholics,  even  that 
of  the  Jews,  even  that  of  the  Swedenborgians, 
18 


THE  SOURCES 


from  which  we  need  find  ourselves  excluded." 
He  certainly  liked  to  exercise  this  privilege, 
but  he  admits  that  "  my  grounds  may  have 
been  but  the  love  of  the  exhibition  in  general, 
thanks  to  which  figures,  faces,  furniture, 
sounds,  smells  and  colours  became  for  me, 
wherever  enjoyed,  and  enjoyed  most  where 
most  collected,  a  positive  little  orgy  of  the 
senses  and  riot  of  the  mind."  ^Whjch  was 
to  be  expected ;  as  also  was  the  fact  that  he 
never  broke  his  childish  habit  of  regarding 
his  father's  religion  as  a  closed  temple  stand- 
ing in  the  centre  of  his  family  life,  the  general 
holiness  of  which  he  took  for  granted  so 
thoroughly  that  it  never  occurred  to  him  to 
investigate  its  particulars. 

This  European  visit  came  to  an  end  in 
1859,  and  William  and  Henry  James  spent 
the  next  year  or  so  at  Newport  studying  art 
under  the  direction  of  their  friend  John  La 
Farge,  with  the  result  that  William  painted 
extremely  well  in  the  style  of  Manet,  and 
Henry  showed  as  little  ability  in  this  direc- 
tion as  he  had  shown  in  any  other.  In  1861 
the  Civil  War  broke  out;  and  had  it  not 
19 


HENRY  JAMES 


been  for  an  accident  the  whole  character  of 
Mr  James'  genius  would  have  been  altered. 
If  he  had  seen  America  by  the  light  of  burst- 
ing shells  and  flaming  forest  he  might  never 
have  taken  his  eyes  off  her  again,  he  miglit 
have  watched  her  fascinated  through  all 
the  changes  of  tone  and  organisation  which 
began  at  the  close  of  the  war,  he  might  have 
been  the  Great  American  Novelist  in  subject 
as  well  as  origin.  But  it  happened,  in  that 
soft  spring  when  he  and  every  other  young 
man  of  the  North  realised  that  there  was  a 
crisis  at  hand  in  which  their  honour  was 
concerned  and  they  must  answer  Lincoln's 
appeal  for  recruits,  that  he  was  one  day  called 
to  help  in  putting  out  a  fire.  In  working  the 
fire-engine  he  sustained  an  injury  so  serious 
that  he  could  never  hope  to  share  the 
Northern  glory,  that  there  were  before  him 
years  of  continuous  pain  and  weakness,  that 
ultimately  he  formed  a  curious  and  on  the 
whole  mischievous  conception  of  himself. 
For  his  humiliating  position  as  a  delicate  and 
unpromising  student  at  Harvard  Law  School 
while  his  younger  brothers,  Wilky  and 
20 


THE  SOURCES 


Robertson,  were  officers  in  the  Northern 
Army  and  William  was  pursuing  a  brilliant 
academic  career  or  naturalising  with  Agassiz 
in  South  America,  seemed  a  confirmation  of 
his  tutors'  opinion  that  he  was  an  inarticulate 
mediocrity  who  would  never  be  able  to  take 
a  hand  in  the  business  of  life.  And  so  he 
worked  out  a  scheme  of  existence,  which  he 
accepted  finally  in  an  hour  of  glowing  resig- 
nation when  he  was  returning  by  steamer  to 
Newport  from  a  visit  to  a  camp  of  wounded 
soldiers  at  Portsmouth  Grove,  in  which  the 
one  who  stood  aside  and  felt  rather  than  acted 
acquired  thereby  a  mystic  value,  a  spiritual 
supremacy,  which — but  this  was  perhaps  a 
later  development  of  the  theory — would  be 
rubbed  off  by  participation  in  action. 

It  was,  therefore,  with  defiant  industry, 
with  the  intention  of  proving  that  such  as 
he  was  he  had  his  peculiar  worth,  that  he 
set  to  work  to  become  a  writer.  IJis  first 
story  was  published  in  The  Atlantic  Monthly 
when  he  was  twenty -one,  and  it  was  followed 
by  a  number  of  stories,  travel  sketches,  and 
critical  essays,  some  of  which  have  been 
21 


HENRY  JAMES 


reprinted,  and  a  few  farces  which  have  not. 
He  also  went  through  a  necessary  preface  of 
the  literary  life  by  reading  the  proofs  of 
George  Eliot's  novels  before  they  appeared 
in  the  Atlantic  and  reviewing ;  the  profes- 
sion of  literature  differs  from  that  of  the 
stage  in  that  the  stars  begin  instead  of  ending 
as  dressers.  In  1869  he  went  to  Europe  and, 
gaining  certain  impressions  that  had  been  in- 
accessible to  him  as  a  child,  finally  fixed  the 
dye  in  which  his  talent  was  to  be  immersed 
for  the  rest  of  his  life.  He  stepped  for  the 
first  time  into  "  a  private  park  of  great  oaks 
.  .  .  where  I  knew  my  first  sense  of  a  matter 
afterwards,  through  fortunate  years,  to  be 
more  fully  disclosed:  the  springtime  in 
such  places,  the  adored  footpath,  the  first 
primroses,  the  stir  and  scent  of  renascence 
in  the  watered  sunshine  and  under  spreading 
boughs  that  were  somehow  before  aught  else 
the  still  reach  of  the  remembered  lines  of 
Tennyson.  ..."  He  was  admitted  to  the 
homes  of  Ruskin,  Rossetti,  Morris,  Darwin, 
and  George  Eliot,  and  allowed  to  see  the 
wheels  go  round.  But  the  real  significance 

22 


THE  SOUKCES 


of  this  journey  to  Mr  James'  genius  is  the 
part  it  played  in  the  last  days  of  his  beautiful 
cousin,  Mary  Temple.  She  should  have  had 
before  her  a  long  career  of  nobility,  for  "  she 
was  absolutely  afraid  of  nothing  she  might 
come  to  by  living  with  enough  sincerity  and 
enough  wonder. ' '  She  pretended  not  to  know 
that  she  had  been  cheated  out  of  this,  but 
as  she  lay  on  the  death -bed  that  she  would  not 
admit  to  be  even  a  sick-bed,  her  eyes  were 
fixed  intensely  on  the  progress  of  her  cousin 
through  all  the  experiences  that  should  have 
been  hers.  There  came  a  day  when  all  illusion 
failed,  and  she  died  dreadfully,  clinging  to 
consciousness.  Her  death  was  felt  by  Henry 
and  William  James  as  the  end  of  their  youth. 

That,  as  Mr  James  would  have  said,  is  the 
donnee.  The  must  was  trodden  out,  it  had 
only  to  ferment,  to  be  bottled,  to  be  mellowed 
by  time  into  the  perfect  wine.  There  is 
nothing  in  all  the  innumerable  volumes  that 
Mr  James  was  to  pour  out  in  the  next 
forty-five  years  of  which  the  intimation  is 
not  present  in  these  first  adventures. 
23 


n 

THE  INTEKNATIONAL  SITUATION 

IT  is  no  use  turning  up  those  first  stories 
that  appeared  in  The  Atlantic  Monthly 
and  The  Galaxy  unless  one  has  formed 
an  affection  for  the  literary  personality  of 
Mr  James.  The  image  they  provoke  of  the 
literary  prentice  bending  over  his  task  with 
the  tip  of  his  tongue  reflectively  protruding 
like  a  small  boy  drawing  on  his  slate,  is 
amusing  enough;  but  they  themselves  are 
such  pale  dreams  as  might  visit  a  New 
England  spinster  looking  out  from  her  snuff- 
coloured  parlour  on  a  grey  drizzling  day. 
Where  there  is  any  richness  of  effect,  as  in 
The  Romance  of  Certain  Old  Clothes,  it  comes 
from  the  influence  of  Nathaniel  Hawthorne. 
That  story,  which  tells  how  a  girl  loved 
her  sister's  husband,  waited  eagerly  for  her 
death  that  she  might  marry  him,  and  later 
wheedled  from  him  the  key  of  the  chest 
24 


THE  INTERNATIONAL   SITUATION 

in  which  the  dead  wife  had  left  her  finery 
to  await  her  baby  daughter's  maturity,  is 
seven-eighths  prelude,  and  the  catastrophe, 
which  is  the  finding  of  the  girl  kneeling  dead 
beside  the  chest  with  the  mark  of  phantom 
fingers  on  her  throat,  comes  with  too  short 
and  small  a  report.  But  in  spite  of  its  pitiful 
construction  it  is  the  only  one  of  the  dozen 
stories  which  Mr  James  published  before 
his  visit  to  Europe  in  1869  that  shows  any 
of  the  imaginative  exuberance  which  one 
accepts  as  an  earnest  of  coming  genius. 

Hawthorne  was  not  altogether  a  happy 
influence — it  is  due  to  him  that  Mr  James' 
characters  have  "  almost  wailed  "  their  way 
from  The  Passionate  Pilgrim  to  The  Golden 
Bowl — but  he  certainly  shepherded  Mr  James 
into  the  European  environment  and  lent 
him  a  framework  on  which  to  drape  his 
emotions  until  he  had  discovered  his  own 
power  to  build  up  an  imaginative  structure. 
The  plot  of  The  Passionate  Pilgrim,  with  its 
American  who  comes  to  England  to  claim  a 
cousin' s  estate,  falls  in  love  with  the  usurper's 
sister,  is  driven  from  the  door,  and  dies  just 
25 


HENEY  JAMES 


after  the  usurper's  death  has  delivered  to 
him  all  he  wants,  is  very  clumsy  Hawthorne, 
but  in  those  days  Mr  James  could  not  draw 
normal  events  and  he  had  to  have  some 
medium  for  expressing  his  wealth  of  feeling 
about  England.  It  is  amazing  to  see  how 
rich  that  wealth  already  was,  how  much 
deeper  than  mere  pleasure  in  travel  was  his 
delight  in  the  parks  and  private  grandeurs 
of  England;  and  how,  too,  a  fundamental 
fallacy  was  already  perverting  it  to  an  almost 
Calvinist  distrust  of  the  activities  of  the 
present. 

"  I  entered  upon  life  a  perfect  gentleman," 
says  the  American  as  he  sits  in  Hampton 
Court.  "  I  had  the  love  of  old  forms  and 
pleasant  rites,  and  I  found  them  nowhere — 
found  a  world  all  hard  lines  and  harsh  lights, 
without  lines,  without  composition,  as  they 
say  of  pictures,  without  the  lovely  mystery 
of  colour.  .  .  .  Sitting  here,  in  this  old  park, 
in  this  old  country,  I  feel  that  I  hover  on  tne  • 
misty  verge  of  what  might  have  been !  I 
should  have  been  born  here,  not  there; 
here  my  makeshift  distinctions  would  have 
found  things  they'd  have  been  true  of.  ... 
26 


THE  INTERNATIONAL  SITUATION 

This  is  a  world  I  could  have  got  on  with 
beautifully." 

There  you  have  the  first  statement  of  the 
persistent  illusion,  to  which  he  was  helped  by 
his  odd  lack  of  the  historic  sense  and  which 
confused  his  estimate  of  modern  life,  that  the 
past  would  have  been  a  happier  home  for 
those  who  like  himself  loved  fastidious  living. 
He  had  a  tremendous  sense  of  the  thing  that 
is  and  none  at  all  of  the  thing  that  has  been, 
and  thus  he  was  always  being  misled  by  such 
lovely  shells  of  the  past  as  Hampton  Court 
into  the  belief  that  the  past  which  inhabited 
them  was  as  lovely.  The  calm  of  Canter- 
bury Close  appeared  to  him  as  a  remnant  of 
a  time  when  all  England,  bowed  before  the 
Church,  was  as  calm ;  whereas  the  calm  is 
really  a  modern  condition  brought  about 
when  the  Church  ceased  to  have  anything 
to  do  with  England.  'He  never  perceived 
that  life  is  always  a  little  painful  at  the 
moment,  not  only  at  this  moment  but  at  all 
moments ;  that  the  wine  of  experience  always 
makes  a  raw  draught  when  it  has  just  been 
27 


HENKY  JAMES 


trodden  out  from  bruised  grapes  by  the 
pitiless  feet  of  men,  that  it  must  be  subject 
to  time  before  it  acquires  suavity.  The  lack 
of  this  perception  matters  little  in  his  early 
work  but  it  is  vastly  important  in  shaping 
his  later  phases. 

There  are  no  such  personal  revelations  in 
The  Madonna  o/  the  Future,  nor  anything, 
indeed,  at  all  characteristic  of  Mr  James. 
There  is  beauty  in  the  tale  of  the  American 
painter  who  dreams  over  a  model  for  twenty 
years,  while  he  and  she  grow  old,  and  leaves 
at  his  death  nothing  more  to  show  for  his 
dreams  than  a  cracked  blank  canvas ;  and 
the  Florentine  background  is  worked  on 
diligently  and  affectionately.  But  it  is 
admirable  in  quite  an  uncharacteristic  way, 
like  a  figure  picture  painted  with  the  utmost 
brilliance  of  technique  and  from  perfect 
models  by  a  painter  whose  real  passion  was 
for  landscape.  Yet  it  was  only  a  year  later, 
in  Madame  de  Mauves,  that  Mr  James  found 
himself,  both  his  manner  and  the  core  of  the 
matter  which  was  to  occupy  him  for  the 
happiest  part  of  his  literary  life.  Euphemia 
28 


THE  INTERNATIONAL  SITUATION 

de  Mauves,  the  prim  young  American  who 
moves  languidly  through  the  turfy  avenues 
of  the  French  forest,  her  faith  in  decency  of 
living  perpetually  outraged  by  her  husband's 
infidelities  and  his  odd  demand  that  she 
should  make  him  a  cuckold  so  that  at  least 
he  should  not  have  the  discomfort  of  looking 
up  at  her,  is  the  first  of  the  many  exquisite 
women  whom  Mr  James  brought  into  being 
by  his  capacity  to  imagine  characters 
solidly  and  completely,  his  perception  of  the 
subtle  tones  of  life,  and  his  extreme  verbal 
delicacy.  And  she  is  given  a  still  greater 
importance  by  the  queer  twist  at  the  end  of 
the  story  by  which  M.  de  Mauves  blows  his 
brains  out  for  no  reason  at  all  but  that  he  is 
hopelessly,  helplessly,  romantically  in  love 
with  this  cold  wife  who  will  be  so  unreason- 
able about  trifles.  Mr  James  writes  her 
story  not  only  as  though  he  stood  upon  the 
Atlantic  shores  looking  eastward  at  the  plight 
of  a  compatriot  domiciled  with  lewd  men  and 
light  women,  but  also  as  though  he  sat  in  the 
company  of  certain  gracious  men  and  women 
of  the  world  who  could  not  get  under  way 
29 


HENRY  JAMES 


with  their  accomplishment  of  charm  because 
the  grim  alien  in  the  corner  will  keep 
prodding  them  with  a  disapproval  as  out  of 
place  in  this  salon  as  a  deal  plank.  Madame 
de  Mauves,  in  fine,  is  the  first  figure  invented 
by  Mr  James  to  throw  light  upon  what  he 
called  "  the  international  situation." 

It  took  all  Mr  James'  cosmopolitan  train- 
ing to  see  that  there  existed  an  international 
situation,  that  the  fact  that  Americans 
visited  Europe  constituted  a  drama.  An 
Englishman  who  visited  Italy  did  no  more 
than  take  a  look  at  a  more  richly  coloured 
order  of  life  that  braced  him  up,  as  any  gay 
spectacle  might  have  done,  to  return  to  his 
own ;  his  travel  was  a  pleasure,  or,  at  most, 
if  he  happened  to  be  a  Landor  or  a  Browning, 
an  inspiration.  It  might  reasonably  be 
supposed  that  the  visit  to  Europe  of  an 
American  was  no  greater  matter.  But  Mr 
James  knew  that  the  wealthy  American  was 
in  the  position  of  a  man  who  has  built  a  com- 
fortable house  and  has  plenty  of  money  over, 
yet  cannot  furnish  it  because  furniture  is 
neither  made  nor  sold  in  his  country ;  until 
80 


THE   INTERNATIONAL    SITUATION 

he  has  crossed  the  sea  to  the  land  where  they 
do  make  furniture  he  must  sleep  and  eat  on 
the  floor. 

"  One  might  enumerate,"  he  writes  in 
those  early  days,  "  the  items  of  high  civilisa- 
tion as  it  exists  in  other  countries,  which 
are  absent  from  the  texture  of  American 
life,  until  it  should  become  a  wonder  what 
was  left.  No  State,  in  the  European  sense 
of  the  word,  and  indeed  barely  a  specific 
national  name.  No  sovereign,  no  court,  no 
personal  loyalty,  no  aristocracy.  ..." 

There  follows  a  long  list,  so  long  as  to 
provoke  the  "  natural  remark  .  .  .  that  if 
these  things  are  left  out  everything  is  left 
out."  And,  Mr  James  goes  on  to  complain, 
".it  takes  so  many  things — such  an  accumu- 
lation of  history  and  custom,  such  a  com- 
plexity of  manners  and  types,  to  form  a  fund 
of  suggestion  for  a  novelist."  He  wrote 
novelist  because  at  the  moment  he  was 
criticising  Hawthorne,  but  he  would  cer- 
tainly have  applied  his  phrase  to  anyone  who 
desired  his  life  to  be  not  a  corduroy  track 
31 


HENRY  JAMES 


but  a  marble  terrace  with  palaces  on  the  one 
hand  and  fair  gardens  on  the  other. 

Since  the  pilgrimage  for  these  items  of 
high  civilisation  appeared  to  Europeans — 
as  innumerable  contemporary  allusions 
show  it  did — as  mere  globe-trottings,  the 
pilgrims  themselves  were  likely  to  be  as  mis- 
understood. For  one  thing,  although  they 
were  unorganised  so  far  as  culture  went,  they 
formed  at  home  a  very  cohesive  moral  com- 
munity. The  American  women  who  came 
to  Europe  took  for  granted  that  however 
people  might  be  habited — people,  that  is, 
whose  manners  showed  them  "  nice"  —and 
in  whatever  frivolous  array  they  might  be 
flounced  and  ribboned,  they  were  certain  to 
wear  next  their  skin  the  hair-shirt  of  Puritan 
rectitude.  The  innocent  freedoms  which 
they  permitted  themselves  because  they 
held  this  supposition,  and  the  terrifying  sur- 
mises to  which  these  gave  rise  in  the  mind  of 
the  Old  World,  unaware  of  the  innocence  of 
the  New,  made  much  material  for  drama. 
And  more  dramatic  still  was  the  moment, 
which  came  to  so  many  of  the  travellers  who 
32 


THE  INTERNATIONAL  SITUATION 

formed  close  personal  relationships  with 
Europeans,  when  they  realised  that  the 
moral  standards  to  which  they  had  nation- 
ally pledged  themselves,  and  which  they 
individually  obeyed  with  extraordinary 
fidelity,  were  here  regarded  as  simply 
dowdy.  "Compromise!"  was  the  cry  of 
Latin  and  even  English  society.  "  Com- 
promise on  every  and  any  of  the  Command- 
ments you  like !  Do  anything  you  can,  in 
fact,  to  rub  down  those  rude  angles  you 
present  to  human  intercourse !  "  And  yet 
it  was  not  to  be  deduced  that  Europe  was 
lax.  One  had  only  to  look  behind  the  super- 
ficial show  to  see  that  it  had  its  own  re- 
ligion, perhaps  a  more  terrible  religion  than 
any  New  England  ever  knew,  and  that  what 
seemed  its  laziest  pleasures  were  sometimes 
its  most  dreadful  rites. 

This  last  conception  of  Europe  is  the  sub- 
ject of  Roderick  Hudson  (1875).  Roderick 
Hudson  is  not  a  good  book.  It  throws  a 
light  upon  the  lack  of  attention  given  at 
that  period  to  the  art  of  writing  that  within 
a  few  years  of  each  other  two  men  of  great 
o  33 


HENRY  JAMES 


genius — Thomas  Hardy  and  Henry  James — 
wrote  in  their  thirties  first  novels  spoilt  by 
technical  blemishes  of  a  sort  that  the  most 
giftless  modern  miss  with  a  subscription  to 
Mudie's  would  never  commit  in  her  first 
literary  experiment.  Roderick  Hudson  is 
wooden,  it  is  crammed  with  local  colour  like 
a  schoolmistress's  bedroom  full  of  photo- 
graphs of  Rome,  it  has  a  plain  boiled  suet 
heroine  called  Mary.  But  its  idea  is  mag- 
nificent. An  American  of  fortune  takes 
Hudson,  who  has  already  shown  talent  as  a 
sculptor,  from  his  stool  in  a  lawyer's  office 
in  Northampton,  Massachusetts,  and  sets 
him  up  in  a  studio  in  Rome.  It  is  the  fear 
of  old  Mrs  Hudson  and  of  Mary,  his  fiancee, 
that  European  life  will  be  too  soft  for  him. 
But  the  very  opposite  occurs ;  it  is  he  who 
is  too  soft  for  European  life.  The  business 
of  art  means  not  only  lounging  under  the 
pines  of  the  Villa  Ludovisi  and  chiselling 
the  noble  substance  of  Carrara  marble;  it 
means  also  the  painful  toil  of  creation,  which 
demands  from  the  artist  an  austerer  re- 
nunciation of  every  grossness  than  was  ever 
34 


THE  INTERNATIONAL   SITUATION 

expected  of  any  law-abiding  citizen  of 
Northampton,  which  sends  a  man  naked  and 
alone  to  awful  moments  which,  if  he  be 
strong,  give  him  spiritual  strength,  but  if 
he  be  weak  heap  on  him  the  black  weakness 
of  neurasthenia.  And  when  that  has  turned 
him  into  a  raw,  hurt,  raging  creature  he  is 
further  snared  by  the  loveliness  of  Christina 
Light,  who  is  characteristically  European  in 
that  her  circumstances  have  not  the  same 
clear  beauty  as  her  face.  She  is  being 
hawked  over  the  Continent  to  find  a  rich 
husband  by  her  mother  and  a  Cavaliere 
who  is  really  her  father,  and  this  ugly  girl- 
hood has  so  corrupted  her  vigorous  spirit 
that  the  young  American's  courtship 
provokes  from  her  nothing  but  eccentric 
favours  or  perverse  insults.  After  the 
collapse  of  his  art  and  his  love  Roderick 
falls  over  a  precipice  in  a  too  minutely 
described  Switzerland,  hurled  by  a  denoue- 
ment which  has  inspired  Mr  James  to  one  of 
his  broadest  jokes.  In  the  first  edition 
Roderick,  on  hearing  that,  while  he  has  been 
vexing  his  benefactor  with  his  moods,  that 
35 


HENRY  JAMES 


gentleman  has  been  manfully  repressing  a 
passion  for  Mary,  exclaims,  "  It's  like  some- 
thing in  a  novel !  "  which  Mr  James  in  the 
definitive  edition  has  altered  to,  "It's  like 
something  in  a  bad  novel !  " 
v  i  This  conception  of  Europe  as  a  complex 
organism  which  would  have  no  use,  or  only 
a  cruel  use,  for  those  bred  by  the  simple 
organism  of  America,  animates  Four  Meet- 
ings (1877),  that  exquisite  short  story  which 
came  first  of  all  of  the  many  masterpieces 
that  Mr  James  was  to  produce.  It  is  the 
tale  of  a  little  schoolmistress  who,-  having 
long  nourished  a  passion  for  Europe  upon 
such  slender  intimations  as  photographs  of 
the  Castle  of  Chillon,  at  last  collects  a  sum 
for  the  trip,  is  met  at  Havre  by  a  cousin, 
one  of  those  Americans  on  whom  Conti- 
nental life  has  acted  as  a  solvent  of  all  decent 
moral  tissues,  and  is  tricked  out  of  her  money 
by  his  story  of  a  runaway  marriage  with  a 
Countess ;  returns  to  New  England  hoping 
to  "see  something  of  this  dear  old  Europe 
yet,"  and  has  that  hope  ironically  fulfilled 
by  the  descent  upon  her  for  life  of  the  said 
36 


THE  INTERNATIONAL  SITUATION 

Countess,  who  is  so  distinctly  "  something 
of  this  dear  old  Europe"  that  the  very  sight 
of  her  transports  the  travelled  recounter  of 
the  story  to  "  some  dusky  landing  before 
a  shabby  Parisian  quatrieme — to  an  open 
door  revealing  a  greasy  ante-chamber,  and 
to  Madame,  leaning  over  the  banisters,  while 
she  holds  a  faded  dressing-gown  together 
and  bawls  down  to  the  portress  to  bring  up 
her  coffee."  It  is  one  of  the  saddest  stories 
in  the  world,  and  one  of  the  cleverest. 
There  is  not  one  of  its  simple  phrases  but 
has  its  beautiful  bearing  on  the  subject,  and 
in  the  treatment  of  emotional  values  one 
sees  that  the  essays  on  French  Poets  and 
Novelists  (1878),  which  for  some  years  he 
had  been  sending  to  America  with  the 
excited  air  of  a  missionary,  were  the  notes 
of  an  attentive  pupil.  "  Detachment"  was 
the  lesson  that  that  period  preached  in  its 
reaction  against  the  George  Sand  method, 
whereby  the  author  rolled  through  his  pages 
locked  in  an  embrace  with  his  subject.  We 
have  forgotten  its  real  significance,  so  fre- 
quently has  it  been  used  as  an  excuse  for 
37 


HENRY  JAMES 


the  treatment  of  emotional  situations  with 
encyclopaedic  detail  of  circumstance  and  not 
a  grain  of  emotional  realisation,  but  here  we 
can  recover  it.  The  author's  pity  for  the 
schoolmistress  is  never  allowed  to  make  his 
Countess  sinister  instead  of  gross,  and  his 
sense  of  the  comic  in  the  Countess  is  never 
allowed  to  make  the  schoolmistress's  woe 
more  dreary;  the  situation  stands  as  solid  and 
has  as  many  aspects  as  it  would  have  in  life. 
The  American  (1877)  still  holds  this  view 
of  Europe.  Its  theme,  to  quote  Mr  James 
in  the  preface  of  the  definitive  edition,  is 
"  the  situation,  in  another  country  and  an 
aristocratic  society,  of  some  robust  but 
insidiously  beguiled  and  betrayed,  some 
cruelly  wronged  compatriot;  the  point 
being  in  especial  that  he  should  suffer  at  the 
hands  of  persons  pretending  to  represent 
the  highest  possible  civilisation  and  to 
be  of  an  order  far  superior  to  his  own." 
Christopher  Newman,  the  robust  com- 
patriot, is  such  a  large,  simple,  lovable 
person  that  the  rest  of  the  story  leads  one 
to  suspect  that  one  may  say  of  Mr  James, 
38 


THE  INTEENATIONAL  SITUATION 

as  he  said  of  Balzac,  that  "  his  figures,  as  a 
general  thing,  are  better  than  the  use  he 
makes  of  them."  He  walks  through  Europe 
examining  its  culture  with  such  an  effect  on 
the  natives  as  an  amiable  buffalo  traversing 
the  Galerie  d'Apollon  might  produce  upon 
the  copyists  of  the  Louvre,  and  finally  pre- 
sents himself  at  the  house  where  he  is  least 
welcome  in  the  world,  the  home  of  the  de 
Bellegardes,  a  proud  and  ancient  Eoyalist 
family.  Thereafter,  the  novel  is  an  exposi- 
tion of  the  way  things  do  not  happen. 
Claire  de  Cintre,  the  widowed  daughter 
whom  Newman  desires  to  marry,  is  repre- 
sented as  having  above  all  things  beauty 
of  character ;  but  when  her  family  snatches 
her  from  him  in  a  frenzy  of  pride  she  allows 
herself  to  be  bundled  into  a  convent  with  a 
weakness  that  would  convict  of  imbecility 
any  woman  of  twenty-eight.  And  since 
her  mother  and  brother  had  murdered  her 
father  by  refusing  him  medicine  at  a  physical 
crisis,  and  sustained  themselves  in  the  act 
by  the  reflection  that  after  all  they  were  only 
keeping  up  the  good  old  family  tone,  one 
39 


HENRY  JAMES 


wonders  where  she  got  this  beauty  of  char- 
acter. The  child  of  this  damned  house 
might  have  flamed  with  a  strange  fire,  but 
she  could  not  have  diffused  a  rectory  lamp- 
light. But  the  series  of  inconsistencies  of 
which  this  is  only  one  leads,  like  a  jolting 
motor-bus  that  puts  one  down  at  Hampton 
Court,  to  an  exquisite  situation.  Newman 
discovers  the  secret  of  the  Marquis'  murder 
and  intends  to  publish  it  as  a  punishment 
for  the  cruel  wrong  the  de  Bellegardes  have 
done  him,  but  sacrifices  this  satisfaction 
simply  because  there  can  be  no  link — not 
even  the  link  of  revenge — between  such 
as  they  and  such  as  he.  In  all  literature 
there  is  no  passage  so  full  of  the  very  passion 
of  moral  exaltation  as  the  description  of  how 
Newman  stands  before  the  Carmelite  house 
in  the  Rue  d'Enfer  and  looks  up  at  the  blank, 
discoloured  wall,  behind  which  his  lost  lady 
is  immured,  then  walks  back  to  Notre  Dame 
and  there,  "  the  far-away  bells  chiming  off 
into  space,  at  long  intervals,  the  big  bronze 
syllables  of  the  Word,"  decides  that  such 
things  as  revenge  "  were  really  not  hia 
40 


THE   INTEKNATIONAL    SITUATION 

game."  So  it  is  with  Mr  James  to  the  end. 
The  foreground  is  as  often  as  not  red  with 
the  blcuad  of  slaughtered  probabilities;  a 
gentleman  at  a  dinner-party  tells  the  lady 
on  his  left  (a  perfect  stranger  who  never 
appears  again  in  the  story)  that  some  years 
ago  he  proposed  to  the  lady  in  white  sitting 
opposite  to  them ;  a  curio  dealer  calls  on  a 
lady  in  Portland  Place  just  to  wind  up  the 
plot.  But  the  great  glow  at  the  back,  the 
emotional  conflagration,  is  always  right. 
/The  EuropeansJJJ&Q-m&iks  the  first  time 
'when  Mr  James  took  the  international  situa- 
tion as  a  joke,  and  he  could  joke  very 
happily  in  those  days  when  his  sentence 
was  a  straight  young  thing  that  could  run 
where  it  liked,  instead  of  a  delicate  creature 
swathed  in  relative  clauses  as  an  invalid 
in  shawls.  There  is  no  other  book  by  Mr 
James  which  has  quite  the  clear,  sunlit 
charm  of  this  description  of  the  visit  of 
Eugenia,  the  morganatically  married 
Baroness,  and  her  brother  Felix,  the 
Bohemian  painter,  to  their  cousins'  New 
England  farm.  There  is  nothing  at  all  to 
41 


HENRY  JAMES 


their  discredit  in  the  past  of  these  two 
graceful  young  people,  but  they  resemble 
Harlequin  and  Columbine  in  the  instability 
of  their  existence  and  the  sharp  line  they 
draw  between  their  privacy  and  their 
publicity.  It  appears  to  them  natural  that 
the  private  life  should  be  spent  largely  in 
wondering  how  the  last  public  appearance 
went  off  and  planning  effects  for  the  next, 
a  point  of  view  which  arouses  the  worst 
suspicions  in  their  cousins,  who  are  accus- 
tomed to  live  as  though  the  sky  were  indeed 
a  broad  open  eye.  So  Felix  has  the  greatest 
difficulty  in  persuading  his  uncle,  who  takes 
thirty-two  bites  to  a  moral  decision,  just  as 
Mr  Gladstone  took  thirty-two  bites  to  a 
mouthful,  that  he  is  a  suitable  husband  for 
his  cousin  Gertrude ;  and  poor  Eugenia  fails 
altogether  in  an  environment  where  a  lie 
from  her  lips  is  not  treated  as  un  petit  peche 
d'une  petite  femme,  but  remains  simply  a  lie. 
The  frame  of  mind  this  state  of  affairs 
produces  in  the  poor  lady  is  exquisitely 
described  in  a  passage  which  shows  her  going 
wistfully  through  the  house  of  the  man  who 
42 


THE   INTEKNATIONAL  SITUATION 

did  not  propose  to  her  because  he  detected 
her  lie,  after  a  visit  to  his  dying  mother. 

"  Mrs  Acton  had  told  Eugenia  that  her 
waiting-woman  would  be  in  the  hall  to  show 
her  downstairs ;  but  the  large  landing  out- 
side her  door  was  empty,  and  Eugenia  stood 
there  looking  about.  .  .  .  She  passed  slowly 
downstairs,  still  looking  about.  The  broad 
staircase  made  a  great  bend,  and  in  the 
angle  was  a  high  window,  looking  westward, 
with  a  deep  bench,  covered  with  a  row  of 
flowering  plants  in  curious  old  pots  of  blue 
China-ware.  The  yellow  afternoon  light 
came  in  through  the  flowers  and  flickered 
a  little  on  the  white  wainscots.  Eugenia 
paused  a  moment ;  the  house  was  perfectly 
still,  save  for  the  ticking,  somewhere,  of  a 
great  clock.  The  lower  hall  stretched  away 
at  the  foot  of  the  stairs,  half  covered  over 
with  a  large  Oriental  rug.  Eugenia  lingered 
a  little,  noticing  a  great  many  things. 
'  Comme  c'est  bien  ! '  she  said  to  herself ; 
such  a  large,  solid,  irreproachable  basis  of 
existence  the  place  seemed  to  her  to  in- 
dicate. And  then  she  reflected  that  Mrs 
Acton  was  soon  to  withdraw  from  it.  The 
reflection  accompanied  her  the  rest  of  the 
43 


HENRY  JAMES 


way  downstairs,  where  she  paused  again, 
making  more  observations.  The  hall  was 
extremely  broad,  and  on  either  side  of  the 
front  door  was  a  wide,  deeply-set  window, 
which  threw  the  shadows  of  everything 
back  into  the  house.  There  were  high- 
backed  chairs  along  the  wall  and  big  Eastern 
vases  upon  tables,  and,  on  either  side,  a 
large  cabinet  with  a  glass  front  and  little 
curiosities  within,  dimly  gleaming.  The 
doors  were  open — into  the  darkened  parlour, 
the  library,  the  dining-room.  All  these 
rooms  seemed  empty.  Eugenia  passed 
along  and  stopped  a  moment  on  the  thres- 
hold of  each.  '  Comme  c'est  bien  / '  she 
murmured  again;  she  had  thought  of  just 
such  a  house  as  this  when  she  decided  to 
come  to  America.  She  opened  the  front 
door  for  herself — her  light  tread  had 
summoned  none  of  the  servants — and  on 
the  threshold  she  gave  a  last  look.  ..." 

That  is  the  pure  note  of  the  early  James, 
like  a  pipe  played  carefully  by  a  boy.  It 
sounds  as  beautifully  in  Daisy  Miller,  that 
short  novel  which,  though  it  deals  with 
conditions  peculiar  to  a  small  section  of 
44 


THE  INTEKNATIONAL  SITUATION 

Continental  life  forty  years  ago,  will  strike 
each  new  generation  afresh  as  sad  and  lovely. 
Daisy,  who  is  like  one  of  those  girls  who 
smile  upon  us  from  the  covers  of  American 
magazines,  glaringly  beautiful  and  healthy 
but  without  the  "  tone"  given  by  diligent 
study  of  the  grace  of  conduct,  comes  to 
Europe  and  plays  in  its  sunshine  like  a 
happy  child.  She  wants  to  go  to  the  Castle 
of  Chillon,  so  she  accepts  the  escort  for  the 
afternoon  of  a  young  American  who  is  stay- 
ing at  the  same  hotel ;  she  likes  to  walk  in 
the  Pincian,  so  she  takes  a  stroll  there  one 
afternoon  with  a  certain  liquid-eyed  Roman. 
The  woman  who  does  a  thing  for  the  sake 
of  the  thing  in  itself  is  always  suspected 
by  society,  and  the  American  colony,  which 
professes  the  mellow  conventions  of  Europe 
with  all  its  own  national  crudity,  accuses 
her  of  vulgarity  and  even  lightness.  They 
talk  so  bitterly  that  when  the  young 
American,  who  is  half  in  love  with  Daisy, 
finds  her  viewing  the  Colosseum  by  moon- 
light with  the  Roman,  he  leaps  to  the  con- 
clusion that  she  is  a  disreputable  woman. 
46 


HENRY  JAMES 


Why  he  does  so  is  not  quite  clear,  since 
surely  it  is  the  essential  thing  about  a  dis- 
reputable woman  that  her  evenings  are  not 
free  for  visits  to  the  Colosseum.  Poor 
Daisy  takes  in  part  of  his  meaning  and,  say- 
ing in  a  little  strange  voice,  "  I  don't  care 
whether  I  get  Roman  fever  or  not !  "  goes 
back  to  her  hotel  and  dies  of  malaria.  And 
the  young  American, "  staring  at  the  raw  pro- 
tuberance among  the  April  daisies"  in  the 
Protestant  cemetery,  learns  from  the  Roman's 
lips  that  Daisy  was  "  most  innocent." 

It  is  a  lyric  whose  beauty  may  be 
measured  by  the  attention  which,  in  spite 
of  its  tragedy,  it  everywhere  provoked.  It 
was  interesting  to  note  how  often  in  the 
obituary  notices  of  Mr -James  it  was  said 
that  he  had  never  attained  popularity,  for 
it  shows  how  soon  London  forgets  its  gifts 
of  fame.  From  1875  to  1885  (to  put  it 
roughly)  all  England  and  America  were  as 
captivated  by  the  clear  beauty  of  Mr 
James'  work  as  in  the  nineties  they  were 
hypnotised  by  the  bright-coloured  beauty 
of  Mr  Kipling's  art.  On  London  staircases 
46 


THE  INTERNATIONAL  SITUATION 

everyone  turned  to  look  at  the  American 
with  the  long,  silky,  black  beard  which,  I 
am  told  by  one  who  met  him  then,  gave  him 
the  appearance  of  "an  Elizabethan  sea 
captain."  But  for  all  the  exquisiteness  of 
Daisy  Miller  there  were  discernible  in  it 
certain  black  lines  which,  like  the  dark  vein- 
ing  in  a  crocus  that  foretells  its  decay, 
showed  that  this  was  a  loveliness  which  was 
in  the  very  act  of  passing.  The  young 
American  might  have  been  so  worked  upon 
by  his  friends  that  he  could  readily  believe 
his  Daisy  a  light  woman,  but  he  need  not 
have  manifested  his  acceptance  of  this  belief 
by  being  grossly  rude  to  her  and  by  reflect- 
ing that  if  "  after  Daisy's  return  there 
had  been  an  exchange  of  jokes  between 
the  porter  and  the  cab-driver  ...  it  had 
ceased  to  be  a  matter  of  serious  regret  to 
him  that  the  little  American  flirt  should  be 
*  talked  about'  by  low-minded  menials." 
When  one  remembers  the  grave  courtesy 
with  which  Christopher  Newman  treated 
Mile  Noemie  Nioche,  the  little  French 
drab  who  called  herself  un  esprit  libre,  it  is 
47 


HENRY  JAMES 


plain  that  we  are  no  longer  dealing  with  the 
same  Mr  James.  The  Mr  James  we  are  to 
deal  with  henceforth  had  ceased  to  be  an 
American  and  had  lost  his  native  reactions 
to  emotional  stimuli.  He  was  becoming  a 
European  and  for  several  years  to  come 
was  to  spend  his  time  slowly  mastering  its 
conventions;  which  means  that  he  was 
learning  a  new  emotional  language. 

The  first  works  he  produced  when  he  was 
at  once  a  finished  writer  and  only  the 
cocoon  of  a  European,  present  the  para- 
doxical appearance  of  being  perfect  in 
phrase  and  incredibly  naive  in  their  estim- 
ates of  persons  and  situations.  The  Pension 
Beaurepas  (1879),  that  melancholy  tale  of 
the  ailing  old  American  whose  wife  and 
daughter  have  dragged  him  ofi  on  an  ex- 
pensive trip  to  Europe,  while  ruin  falls  on 
his  untended  business  in  New  York,  has  its 
tone  of  pathos  spoiled  by  extraordinarily 
cold-blooded  and,  to  women  of  to-day, 
extremely  unsavoury  discussions  of  how  a 
girl  ought  to  behave  if  she  wants  to  be 
married.  The  Siege  of  London  (1883),  which 
48 


THE   INTERNATIONAL  SITUATION 

is  the  story  of  a  Texan  adventuress  of 
many  divorces  who  marries  into  an  English 
county  family,  fails  to  produce  the  designed 
effect  of  outrage,  because  the  adventuress  is 
the  only  person  who  shows  any  signs  of 
human  worth,  and  the  life  which  she  is 
supposed  to  have  violated  by  her  marriage 
is  suggested  simply  by  statements  that  the 
people  concerned  had  titles  and  lived  in 
large  houses.  In  Pandora  (1884),  which 
describes  a  German  diplomat's  amazement 
that  an  unmarried  girl  can  be  a  social  success 
in  America,  we  feel  as  bored  as  we  would  if 
we  were  forced  to  listen  to  the  exclamations 
of  a  dog-fancier  on  rinding  that  a  Pekingese 
with  regular  features  had  got  a  prize  at  a 
dog  show.  In  Lady  Barbarina  (1884), 
which  tells  how  a  peer's  daughter  who 
marries  an  American  millionaire  refuses  to 
live  in  America,  the  American  picture  is 
painted  with  the  flatness  of  a  flagging  inter- 
est, and  we  suspect  Mr  James  of  taking 
English  architecture  as  an  index  of  English 
character ;  he  had  still  to  grasp  the  para- 
dox that  the  people  who  live  in  the  solidities 
D  49 


HENRY  JAMES 


of  Grosvenor  Square  are  the  best  colonising 
and  seafaring  stock  in  the  world.  Jn_Tfte 
Reverberator  (1888),  wherein  an  American 
girl  guilelessly  prattles  to  a  newspaper 
correspondent  about  the  affairs  of  her 
French  fiance's  family  and  is  cast  out  by 
them  when  he  publishes  her  prattlings  in  the 
States,  we  seem  to  see  the  international 
situation  slowly  fading  from  Mr  James' 
immediate  consciousness.  In  turning  over 
its  pages  we  see  the  author  sitting  down 
before  a  pile  of  white  paper  and  finely  in- 
scribing it  with  memories  of  past  contacts 
with  Americans ;  we  do  not  see  him  enter- 
ing his  study  with  traces  still  on  his  lips  of  a 
smile  provoked  in  the  street  outside  by  the 
loveliness  and  innocent  barbarism  of  his 
compatriots.  In  those  days  he  had  lost 
America  and  had  not  yet  found  Europe,  but 
he  was  to  find  it  very  soon.  .  In  A  London 
Life  (1889),  the  tale  of  an  innocent  American 
girl  who  comes  over  to  live  with  her  sister 
and  her  aristocratic  English  husband,  and 
stands  appalled  at  their  debts,  their  de- 
baucheries, their  infidelities,  he  has  rendered 
50 


THE  INTERNATIONAL   SITUATION 

beautifully  the  feeling  caused  by  ill  lives 
when  led  in  old  homes  of  elmy  parks  and 
honourable  histories.  It  is  a  sense  of  dis- 
gust such  as  comes  to  the  early-rising  guest 
who  goes  into  a  drawing-room  in  the  morn- 
ing and  finds  last  night's  coffee-cups  and 
decanters  and  cigarette  ends  looking  dread- 
ful in  the  sunlight.  The  house  is  being  badly 
managed ;  it  will  go  to  rack  and  ruin. 
That  is  an  aspect  of  England;  but  the 
American  onlooker  is  just  a  clean-minded 
little  thing  that  might  have  bloomed  any- 
where, and  all  references  to  her  Ameri-^ 
canness  are  dragged  in  with  an  effort.  It 
is  plain  that  he  had  lost  all  his  love  for  the 
international  situation. 
/That  Mr  James  continued  to  write  about 
Americans  in  Europe  long  after  their 
common  motive  and  their  individual  ad- 
ventures had  ceased  to  excite  his  wonder  or 
his  sympathy,  was  the  manifestation  of  a 
certain  delusion  about  his  art  which  was 
ultimately  to  do  him  a  mischief.  He  be- 
lieved that  if  one  knew  a  subject  one  could 
write  about  it;  and  since  there  was  no 
51 


HENRY  JAMES 


aspect  of  the  international  situation  with 
which  he  was  not  familiar,  he  could  not  see 
why  the  description  of  these  aspects  should 
not  easily  make  art.  The  profound  truth 
that  an  artist  should  feel  passion  for  his 
subject  was  naturally  distasteful  to  one 
who  wanted  to  live  wholly  without  violence 
even  of  the  emotions;  a  preference  for 
passionless  detachment  was  at  that  date 
the  mode  in  French  literature,  which  was 
the  only  literature  that  he  studied  with  any 
attention.  /The  de  Goncourts,  Zola,  and 
even  de  Maupassant  thought  that  an  artist 
ought  to  be  able  to  lift  any  subject  into  art 
by  his  treatment,  just  as  an  advertising 
agent  ought  to  be  able  to  "float"  any 
article  into  popularity  by  his  posters.  But 
human  experience,  which  includes  a  realisa- 
tion of  the  deadness  of  most  of  the  de  Gon- 
courts' and  Zola's  productions,  proves  the 
contrary.  Unless  a  subject  is  congenial  to 
the  character  of  the  artist  the  subconscious 
self  will  not  wake  up  and  reward  the  busy 
conscious  mind  by  distributions  of  ita 
hoarded  riches  in  the  form  of  the  right  word, 
52 


THE  INTERNATIONAL   SITUATION 

the  magic  phrase,  the  clarifying  incident. 
Why  are  books  about  ideas  so  commonly  bad, 
since  the  genius  of  M.  Anatole  France  and 
Mr  Wells  have  proved  that  they  need  not  be 
so,  if  it  be  not  that  the  majority  of  people 
reserve  passion  for  their  personal  relation- 
ships and  therefore  never  "feel"  an  idea 
with  the  sensitive  finger-tips  of  affection  ? 

The  absence  of  this  necessary  attitude  to 
his  subject  explains  in  part  the  tenuity  of 
Mr  James'  later  novels  on  the  international 
situation ;  but  there  is  also  another  element 
that  irritates  present-day  readers  and  makes 
the  texture  of  the  life  represented  seem  poor. 
/That  element,  which  is  not  peculiar  to  Mr 
•  James,  but  is  a  part  of  the  social  atmosphere 
of  his  time,  is  the  persistent  presentation  of 
woman  not  as  a  human  but  as  a  sexual 
being.  One  can  learn  nothing  of  the 
heroine's  beliefs  and  character  for  the 
hullabaloo  that  has  been  set  up  because  she 
has  come  in  too  late  or  gone  out  too  early 
or  omitted  to  provide  herself  with  that 
figure  of  questionable  use — for  the  dove-like 
manners  of  the  young  men  forbid  the 
53 


HENRY  JAMES 


thought  that  she  was  there  to  protect  the  girl 
from  assault,  and  the  mild  tongues  of  the 
young  ladies  make  it  unlikely  that  the  duel 
of  the  sexes  was  then  so  bitter  that  they 
required  an  umpire — the  chaperon.  It 
appears  that  the  young  woman  of  that 
period  could  get  through  the  world  only  by 
perpetually  jumping  through  hoops  held  up 
to  her  by  society,  a  method  of  progression 
which  was  more  suited  to  circus  girls  than 
to  persons  of  dignity,  and  which  sometimes 
caused  nasty  falls.  There  is  nothing  more 
humiliating  to  women  in  all  fiction  than  the 
end  of  A  London  Life,  where  the  heroine, 
appalled  at  having  been  left  in  an  opera  box 
alone  with  a  young  man,  turns  to  him  and 
begs  him,  although  she  knows  well  that  he 
does  not  love  her,  to  marry  her  and  save  her 
good  name.  Purity  and  innocence  are  ex- 
cellent things,  but  a  world  in  which  they  have 
to  be  guarded  by  such  cramping  contrivances 
of  conduct  is  as  ridiculous  as  a  heaven  where 
the  saints  all  go  about  with  their  haloes 
protected  by  mackintosh  covers. 


Ill 

TRANSITION 

JTT  WASHINGTON  SQUARE  (1881), 
i/l/  Mr  James'  first  important  work 
that  does  not  deal  with  the  inter- 
national situation,  is  a  work  of  great  genius. 
Into  the  small  mould  of  the  story  of  how  a 
plain  and  stupid  girl  was  jilted  by  a  fortune- 
hunter  when  he  discovered  that  she  would 
be  disinherited  by  her  contemptuous  father 
on  her  marriage,  Mr  James  concentrated  all 
the  sense  which  he  had  absorbed  throughout 
his  childhood  of  the  simple,  provincial  life 
which  went  on  behind  the  brown  stone  of 
old  New  York.  It  has  in  it  a  wealth  of  feel- 
ing that  does  not  seem  to  have  originated 
with  Mr  James,  just  as  an  old  wives'  tale 
told  over  and  over  again  by  the  fireside 
becomes  charged  with  a  synthetic  emotion 
derived  from  the  comments  and  expressions 
of  innumerable  auditors;  and  one  may 
55 


HENEY  JAMES 


surmise  that  Catherine's  tragedy  was  first 
presented  to  him  as  an  item  of  local  gossip, 
sympathetically  discussed  by  his  charming 
New  York  cousins  and  friends.  Certainly 
the  tale  of  this  dull  girl,  who  was  "  twenty 
years  old  before  she  treated  herself,  for 
evening  wear,  to  a  red  satin  gown  trimmed 
with  gold  fringe,"  and  progressed  by  such 
clumsinesses  through  a  career  of  which  the 
only  remarkable  facts  were  that  "  Morris 
Townsend  had  trifled  with  her  affection, 
and  that  her  father  had  broken  its  spring," 
is  consecrated  by  an  element  of  pity  which 
was  afterwards  signally  to  disappear  from 
Mr  James'  work. 

The  book  so  beautifully  expresses  the  woe 
of  all  those  people  to  whom  nothing  ever 
happens,  who  are  aware  of  the  gay  challenge 
of  life  but  are  prevented  by  something 
leaden  in  their  substance  from  responding, 
that  one  is  not  surprised  to  find  that  like 
most  good  stories  about  inarticulate  people 
— like  Une  Vie  and  Un  Cceur  Simple — it 
is  written  with  the  most  deliberate  cunning. 
The  story  is  evoked  according  to  Turgeniev's 
66 


TRANSITION 


method  of  calling  his  novels  out  of  the 
inchoate  real  world;  and  what  that  is  had 
better,  since  Mr  James  had  been  using 
it  with  increasing  power  since  Roderick 
Hudson,  be  stated  in  his  own  words. 

"  I  have  always  fondly  remembered  a 
remark  that  I  heard  fall  years  ago  from  the 
lips  of  Ivan  Turgeniev  in  regard  to  his  own 
experience  of  the  usual  origin  of  the  fictive 
picture.  It  began  for  him  almost  always 
with  the  vision  of  some  person  or  persons, 
who  hovered  before  him,  soliciting  him,  as 
the  active  or  passive  figure,  interesting  him 
and  appealing  to  him  just  as  they  were  and 
by  what  they  were.  He  saw  them,  in  that 
fashion,  as  disponibles,  saw  them  subject  to 
the  chances,  the  complications  of  existence, 
and  saw  them  vividly,  but  then  had  to  find 
for  them  the  right  relations,  those  that 
would  most  bring  them  out ;  to  imagine,  to 
invent  and  select  and  piece  together  the 
situations  most  useful  and  favourable  to 
the  sense  of  the  creatures  themselves,  the 
complications  they  would  be  most  likely  to 
produce  and  to  feel. 

"  '  To  arrive  at  these  things  is  to  arrive 
67 


HENRY  JAMES 


at  my  "  story," '  he  said,  c  and  that's  the 
way  I  look  for  it.  The  result  is  that 
I'm  often  accused  of  not  having  "  story" 
enough.  I  seem  to  myself  to  have  as  much 
as  I  need — to  show  my  people,  to  exhibit 
their  relations  with  each  other ;  for  that  is 
all  my  measure.  If  I  watch  them  long 
enough  I  see  them  come  together,  I  see  them 
placed,  I  see  them  engaged  in  this  or  that 
act  and  in  this  or  that  difficulty.  How  they 
look  and  move  and  speak  and  behave, 
always  in  the  setting  I  have  found  for 
them,  is  my  account  of  them — of  which  I 
dare  say,  alas,  que  cda  manque  souvent 
<T  architecture.  .  .  .' " 


And  as  regards  the  statement  in  prose  of 
the  conception  thus  formed  it  is  plain  that, 
although  Mr  James  had  formed  his  irra- 
tional dislike  of  Flaubert  many  years  before, 
it  was  that  great  master  who  had  taught 
him  his  art  of  rubbing  down  the  too  brilliant 
phrase  to  tone  with  the  quiet  harmony  of  the 
whole,  of  obliterating  the  exotic  effect  that 
would  compromise  the  lorn  simplicity  of  the 
subject.  This  masterly  use  of  technical 
resource  to  unfold  an  idea  whose  beauty 
58 


TRANSITION 


would  to  a  lesser  artist  have  seemed 
hopelessly  sheathed  in  obscurity,  makes 
Washington  Square  the  perfect  termination 
to  Mr  James'  first  period  of  genius. 

It  was  unfortunately  quite  definitely  a 
termination ;  for  until  ten  years  had  passed 
Mr  James  was  doomed  to  produce  no  work 
which  was  not  to  have  the  solidity  of  its 
characters  and  the  beauty  of  its  prose 
rendered  slightly  ridiculous  by  its  lack  of 
purpose  and  unity.  In  those  days,  when 
the  international  theme  was  slipping  from 
Mr  James'  grasp  and  he  was  looking  round 
for  another,  one  could  no  more  expect  him 
to  produce  work  completely  and  serenely 
formed  by  the  imagination  than  one  could 
ask  an  author  to  continue  his  industry  on  a 
journey  from  Paris  to  Madrid,  with  the  jolt- 
ing of  the  train  destroying  his  physical  calm 
and  the  new  land  crying  for  his  attention  at 
the  carriage  window.  For  Mr  James  was 
literally  travelling  all  through  the  eighties ; 
he  was  touring  either  the  countries  of  Europe 
with  his  body  or  the  art  of  Europe  with  hia 
mind.  It  was  his  intention  to  find  that 
59 


HENRY  JAMES 


intellectual  basis  without  which,  his  blood 
and  upbringing  assured  him,  he  would  be 
unable  to  use  his  genius  with  noble  or 
permanent  results. 

How  difficult  this  search  was  to  be,  and 
yet  how  ultimately  fruitful,  can  be  judged 
from  A  Little  Tour  in  France  ( 1 884).  That  is 
one  of  the  happiest  and  sunniest  travel  books 
in  all  literature.  Ccdum  non  animum  mutant 
qui  trans  mare  currunt ;  but  Mr  James  did, 
and  it  is  as  pleasant  to  see  his  intelligence 
sunning  itself  on  the  hot  Latin  soil,  fresh 
and  cool  as  though  he  had  not  years  of  the 
creative  struggle  behind  him  and  years  more 
to  come,  as  it  is  to  see  a  lizard  crawl  from 
the  crevice  of  a  Provencal  rock  and  play 
among  the  tufts  of  rosemary.  Yet  when- 
ever Mr  James  has  to  note  some  detail  in 
his  description  of  French  towns  which  refers 
to  the  life  which  has  formed  them,  the 
reader's  fury  mounts.  It  is  horrible  that  his 
references  to  the  Franco -Prussian  War  should 
be  faintly  jocular,  and  one  burns  with  shame 
for  them  until  one  comes  to  an  amazing 
sentence  about  the  French  Revolution, 
60 


TRANSITION 


in  which  it  is  plainly  implied  that  the 
lightness  and  necessity  of  that  declaration 
of  the  principle  of  freedom  are  still  debat- 
able questions.  One  perceives  with  relief 
that  he  said  these  things  because,  as  one 
guessed  in  The  Passionate  Pilgrim,  his  strong 
sight  of  the  thing  that  is  was  accompanied 
by  blindness  to  the  thing  that  has  been. 
He  did  not  know  whether  the  Franco- 
Prussian  War  was  horrible  or  not,  because 
he  had  been  out  of  Europe  when  it  raged ; 
and  because  he  had  not  been  born  at  the 
time  he  could  no  more  speak  well  of  the 
French  Revolution  than  he  could  propose 
for  his  club  a  person  whom  he  had  never  met. 
And  for  the  same  reason  he  failed  to  envis- 
age the  Roman  Empire  save  as  a  source  of 
agreeable  ruins  which,  since  he  did  not 
understand  the  spirit  that  built  them,  he 
imagined  might  have  been  made  still  more 
agreeable.  Their  vastness  did  not  impress 
him  as  the  merging-point  of  the  geological 
record  and  history,  but  stirred  in  him  that 
benevolence  which  is  often  aroused  by 
clumsy  largeness.  He  patted  the  Roman 
61 


HENRY  JAMES 


Theatre  at  Aries  as  though  it  were  Jumbo 
at  the  Zoo,  and  remarked,  quite  in  the 
manner  of  Horace  Walpole,  that  the  pave- 
ment of  coloured  marble  "  gives  an  idea  of 
the  elegance  of  the  interior  "  ;  but  the  arena 
at  Nimes  and  that  vast,  high,  yellow  aque- 
duct, whose  three  tiers  appal  the  valley  of 
the  Garden,  were  too  much  for  him,  and  he 
pronounced  them  "  not  at  all  exquisite" 
The  man  who  could  write  those  phrases  was 
incapable  of  forming  a  philosophy,  for  no 
man  can  fully  understand  his  kind  unless  he 
have  a  revelation  of  old  Rome  and  perceive 
in  its  works  a  record  of  the  pride  men  felt 
in  serviceable  labour  for  the  State.  And 
yet  what,  in  this  particular  case,  did  all 
that  matter  ?  What  need  was  there  for 
Mr  James  to  know  anything  but  that  ink 
makes  black,  expressive  marks  on  paper, 
when  he  could  tell  so  exquisitely  how  the 
Chateau  de  Chenonceaux  sends  out  its 
white  galleries  across  the  clear  water  of 
the  Cher,  how  the  crenellated  ramparts  of 
the  Chateau  d'Amboise  look  down  over 
hanging  gardens  to  the  far-shining  Loire, 
62 


TKANSITION 


and  with  what  peculiar  wonder  Carcassonne, 
Aigues-Mortes  and  all  the  other  towns  with 
lovely  names,  glow  in  the  clear  bright  light 
of  France  ?  It  was  enough  that  there 
was  no  beauty  on  earth  that  could  daunt 
his  power  of  description. 

The  record  of  his  mental  wanderings  is 
not  quite  so  happy.  Mr  James  has  an 
immense  prestige  as  critic,  but  a  certain 
sentence  that  occurred  more  than  once 
in  his  obituary  notices  made  it  doubtful 
whether  this  does  not  merely  mean  that 
people  have  run  their  eyes  over  the  titles  of 
Mr  James'  essays  and  have  accepted  the 
fact  that  he  dealt  with  authors  rarely  read 
by  the  British  as  a  guarantee  of  their  rare- 
ness of  merit.  That  it  should  be  reverently 
remarked  on  that  most  solemn  occasion 
that  Flaubert  was  Mr  James'  adored  master, 
when  he  had  written  more  than  one  ex- 
quisitely feline  essay  to  delicately  convey 
what  a  fluke  it  was  that  this  fellow  who 
panted  under  his  phrase  like  a  bricklayer 
under  his  hod  should  have  produced  Madame 
Bovary,  is  just  such  an  ironic  happening  as 
63 


HENRY  JAMES 


he  would  have  liked  to  be  introduced  into 
one  of  his  humorous  studies  of  the  literary 
life.  Such  intimations  make  one  guess 
that  the  homage  which  England  loves  to 
pay  to  the  unread  is  responsible  for  half  Mr 
James'  reputation  as  a  critic  ;  and  probably 
he  owed  the  other  half  to  the  gratitude  of 
his  readers  for  a  pleasure  which  is  un- 
doubtedly given  by  his  critical  writings,  but 
which  nevertheless  does  not  prove  them 
great  criticism.  It  is  true  that  French  Poets 
and  Novelists  are  the  best  reviews  ever 
written,  and  that  it  is  good  to  listen  to  the 
old  author  gossiping  in  Notes  on  Novelists 
(1914)  about  the  authors  he  had  known  long 
ago  and  to  watch  him  tracing,  with  all  his 
supreme  genius  for  detecting  personality, 
the  imprint  of  dead  masters  on  the  fading 
surface  of  old  work.  But  he  is  always 
entirely  lacking  in  that  necessary  element 
of  great  criticism,  the  capacity  for  universal 
reference.  The  eye  that  judges  a  work  of 
art  should  have  surveyed  the  whole  human 
field,  so  that  it  can  tell  from  what  clay  this 
precious  thing  was  made,  in  what  crafts- 
64 


TRANSITION 


man's  cot  that  trick  of  fashioning  was 
learned,  what  natural  beauty  suggested  to 
the  creative  impulse  this  appropriate  form, 
what  human  institution  helped  or  hindered 
its  making.  Of  that  general  culture  Mr 
James  was  so  deficient  that  he  was  capable 
of  inserting  in  quite  an  intelligent  essay  on 
Theophile  Gautier  this  amazing  sentence: 
"  Even  his  a3sthetic  principles  are  held  with 
a  good-humoured  laxity  that  allows  him, 
for  instance,  to  say  in  a  hundred  places  the 
most  delightfully  sympathetic  and  pictorial 
things  about  the  romantic  or  Shakespearean 
drama,  and  yet  to  describe  a  pedantically 
classical  revival  of  the  Antigone  at  Munich 
with  the  most  ungrudging  relish."  And 
while  this  ignorance  was  perpetually  blind- 
ing him  to  the  purpose  of  many  fair  artistic 
structures  his  literary  power  was  perpetu- 
ally betraying  him  into  the  graceful  and 
forceful  publication  of  his  blindness.  Long 
after  one  has  forgotten  all  the  deliverances 
of  critics  with  greater  wisdom  but  less  craft 
of  phrase,  one  remembers  his  extraordi- 
nary opinion  that  Flaubert's  La  Tentation 


de  Saint  Antoine,  that  book  which  will 
appeal  in  every  generation  to  those  who 
have  been  visited  by  the  angel  of  speculative 
thought,  which  is  not  only  itself  a  beautiful 
growth  but  has  borne  beautiful  fruit  in 
Thais,  is  merely  "  strange"  and  has  no  more 
reference  to  life  than  the  gimcrack  Eastern 
Pavilion  at  an  Exposition.  And  he  lacked, 
moreover,  that  necessary  attribute  of  the 
good  critic,  the  power  to  bid  bad  authors 
to  go  to  the  devil.  There  are  certain 
Victorian  works  of  art  which,  however 
much  esteemed  by  the  many,  are  no  more 
matter  for  criticism  than  a  pair  of  elastic- 
sided  boots ;  yet  there  is  a  paper  iD  Essays 
in  London  (1893)  in  which  Mr  James  talks 
of  "  the  numbers  of  sorts  of  distinction, 
the  educated  insight,  the  comprehensive 
ardour  of  Mrs  Humphry  Ward.  .  .  ."  It 
recalls  that  the  art  which  he  privately 
cultivated  was  courtesy,  but  it  suggests 
that  his  criticism  was  bound  to  consist  for 
the  most  part  of  just  such  pleasant  foot- 
notes to  the  obvious  as  Partial  Portraits 
(1888)  which,  with  the  exception  of  some 
66 


TRANSITION 


interesting  personal  recollections  of  Tur- 
geniev,  tell  us  nothing  more  startling  than 
that  de  Maupassant  wrote  a  hard  prose  and 
that  Daudet  was  a  Provencal. 

How  greatly  he  needed  the  intellectual 
basis  which  he  found  in  none  of  these  re- 
searches becomes  increasingly  plain  in  each 
novel  that  he  published  during  this  period. 
The  Portrait  oj  a  Lady  (1881)  is  given  a 
superficial  unity  by  the  beauty  of  its 
heroine ;  on  the  first  reading  one  cannot 
take  one's  eyes  off  the  clear  gaze  that 
Isabel  Archer  levels  at  life.  As  she  moves 
forward  to  meet  the  world,  holding  her 
fortune  in  hand  without  avarice  yet  very 
carefully,  lest  she  should  buy  anything 
gross  with  it,  one  thinks  that  there  never 
was  a  heroine  who  deserved  better  of  life. 

She  spent  half  her  time  in  thinking  of 
beauty,  and  bravery,  and  magnanimity; 
she  had  a  fixed  determination  to  regard 
the  world  as  a  place  of  brightness,  of  free 
expansion,  of  irresistible  action ;  she  thought 
it  would  be  detestable  to  be  afraid  or 
ashamed.  She  had  an  infinite  hope  that 
67 


HENRY  JAMES 


she  would  never  do  anything  wrong."  One 
is  glad  to  see  that  the  girl  has  the  most 
wonderful  friend,  a  woman  who  is  at  once 
the  most  flexible  femme  du  monde  and  the 
freshest  and  most  candid  soul ;  and  among 
the  kindnesses  this  friend  does  her  is  her 
introduction  to  a  certain  Tuscan  villa  that 
looks  down  on  the  valley  of  the  Arno,  where 
on  a  mossy  stone  bench  tangled  with  wild 
roses  there  sits  Gilbert  Osmond,  a  gentle- 
man of  great  dignity  who  has  been  too 
fine  to  partake  in  the  common  struggle 
and  so  lives  in  honest  poverty,  with  his 
daughter  Pansy,  a  little  girl  from  whose 
character  conventual  training  has  removed 
every  attribute  save  whiteness  and  sweet- 
ness, so  that  she  lies  under  life  like  a  fine 
cloth  on  a  sunny  bleaching-green.  Here, 
of  all  places  in  the  world,  she  is  least  likely 
to  meet  the  jealousy  and  falseness  and 
cruelty  which  were  the  only  things  she 
feared,  and  so  she  marries  Osmond  in  the 
happy  faith  that  henceforth  nothing  will 
be  admitted  to  her  life  save  nobility.  But 
all  her  marriage  brings  the  girl  is  evidence 
68 


TEANSITION 


of  increasing  painfulness  that  her  friend  is 
a  squalid  adventuress  who  has  preserved 
her  appearance  of  freshness  as  carefully  as 
a  strolling  musician  his  fiddle,  in  order  that 
she  might  charm  such  honest  fools  as  Isabel ; 
that  Osmond  has  withdrawn  from  the 
world,  not  because  he  is  too  fine  for  it,  but 
because  he  is  a  hating  creature,  and  hates 
the  world  as  he  now  hates  his  wife;  that 
Pansy  is  the  illegitimate  child  of  these  two, 
and  her  need  of  a  dowry  the  chief  reason 
why  Osmond  has  married  Isabel.  It  is  a 
tale  which  would  draw  tears  from  a  re- 
viewer, and  yet  the  conduct  invented  for 
Isabel  is  so  inconsistent  and  so  suggestive 
of  the  nincompoop,  and  so  clearly  proceed- 
ing from  a  brain  whose  ethical  world  was 
but  a  chaos,  that  it  is  a  mistake  to  subject 
the  book  to  the  white  light  of  a  second  read- 
ing. When  we  are  told  that  Isabel  married 
Osmond  because  "  there  had  been  nothing 
very  delicate  in  inheriting  seventy  thousand 
pounds,  and  she  hoped  he  might  use  her 
fortune  in  a  way  that  might  make  her 
think  better  of  it  and  would  rub  ofi  a  certain 
69 


HENRY  JAMES 


grossness  attaching  to  the  good  luck  of  an 
unexpected  inheritance,"  we  feel  that  this 
is  mere  simpering ;  for  there  could  be 
nothing  less  delicate  than  to  marry  a  person 
for  any  reason  but  the  consciousness  of 
passion.  And  the  grand  climax  of  her  con- 
duct, her  return  to  Osmond  after  the  full 
revelation  of  his  guilt  has  come  to  augment 
her  anguish  at  his  unkindness,  proves  her 
not  the  very  paragon  of  ladies  but  merely 
very  ladylike.  If  their  marriage  was  to  be 
a  reality  it  was  to  be  a  degradation  of  the 
will  whose  integrity  the  whole  book  is  an 
invitation  to  admire ;  if  it  was  to  be  a  sham 
it  was  still  a  larger  concession  to  society 
than  should  have  been  made  by  an  honest 
woman.  Yet  for  all  the  poor  quality  of 
the  motives  which  furnish  Isabel's  moral 
stuffing,  The  Portrait  of  a  Lady  is  entirely 
successful  in  giving  one  the  sense  of  having 
met  somebody  far  too  radiantly  good  for 
this  world. 

While  that  novel  reminds  one,  in  the  way 
it  "  comes  off,"  of  a  sum  in  which  the  right 
answer   is   got   by    wrong    working,    The 
70 


TRANSITION 


Bostonians  (1886)  reminds  one  of  a  foolish 
song  set  to  a  good  tune  in  the  way  it  fails  to 
"come  off."  The  beauty  of  the  writing  is 
so  great  that  there  are  descriptions  of  the 
shabby  petticoats  of  a  pioneer,  or  the  vesti- 
bule in  a  mean  block  of  flats,  that  one  would 
like  to  learn  by  heart,  so  that  one  might 
turn  the  phrases  over  in  the  mind  when  one 
wants  to  hear  the  clinking  of  pure  gold. 
And  the  theme,  the  aptness  of  young  persons 
possessed  of  that  capacity  for  contagious 
enthusiasm  which  makes  the  good  propa- 
gandist to  be  exploited  by  the  mercenary 
and  to  deteriorate  under  the  strain  of  public 
life,  is  specially  interesting  to  our  genera- 
tion. Few  of  us  there  are  who  have  not 
seen  with  our  own  eyes  elderly  egoists 
building  up  profitable  autocracies  out  of  the 
ardour  of  young  girls,  or  fierce  advocates 
of  the  brotherhood  of  man  mellowing  into 
contemplative  emptiers  of  pint-pots.  But, 
just  as  the  most  intellectual  conversation 
may  be  broken  up  by  the  continued 
squeal  of  a  loose  chimney-cowl,  so  this 
musical  disclosure  of  fine  material  is  inter- 
71 


HENRY  JAMES 


rap  ted  past  any  reader's  patience  by  a 
nagging  hostility  to  political  effort.  This 
is  not  so  disgraceful  to  Mr  James  as  it 
might  seem,  for  it  is  simply  the  survival 
of  an  affectation  which  was  forced  upon 
the  cultured  American  of  his  youth.  The 
pioneers  who  wanted  to  raise  the  small 
silvery  song  of  art  had  to  tempt  their 
audiences  somehow  from  the  big  brass  band 
of  America's  political  movements;  and  so 
straining  was  this  task  that  even  Emerson, 
who  vibrated  to  the  chord  of  reform  as  to 
no  other,  was  sometimes  vexed  into  such 
foolish  inquiries  as  "  Does  he  not  do  more 
to  abolish  slavery  who  works  all  day  in  his 
own  garden  than  he  who  goes  to  the  aboli- 
tion meetings  and  makes  a  speech  ?  "  It 
was  just  one  of  the  results  of  Mr  James' 
condition  at  this  period  that  he  pre- 
sented to  the  world  so  deliberately  and 
BO  vividly,  and  with  such  an  air  of  feel- 
ing, what  was  no  more  than  the  misty 
reflection  of  some  dead  men's  transitory 
irritations. 

Politics  play  a  very  great  part,  and  in  the 
72 


TRANSITION 


same  sense,  in  The  Princess  Casamassima 
(1886),  but  it  is  the  peculiar  magic  of  that 
strange  book  which  is  at  once  able  and  dis- 
traught, wild  and  meticulous,  that  in  it  all 
perversities  are  somehow  transmuted  into 
loveliness.  It  is  one  of  the  big  jokes  in 
literature  that  it  was  the  writer  who  among 
all  his  contemporaries  held  the  most 
sophisticated  view  of  his  art,  who  prided 
himself  that  on  him  there  gleamed  no 
drop  of  the  dew  of  naivete,  that  brought 
back  to  fiction  the  last  delicious  breath  of 
the  time  when  even  the  best  books  ran  on 
like  this:  "It  happened  that  one  dark 
and  stormy  night  in  March  I,  Sebastian 
Melmoth,  was  traversing  the  plain  of  La 
Mancha.  .  .  .  '  Have  at  you ! '  cried  the 
guard.  .  .  .  '  Seat  yourself,'  said  the 
stranger,  signing  to  his  Hindu  attendant 
that  the  bodies  should  be  removed,  and  com- 
mencing to  cleanse  the  blood  from  his  sword 
with  a  richly  embroidered  handkerchief, 
'  and  I  will  tell  you  the  story  of  my 
life.' '  There  is  always  something  doing 
in  The  Princess  Casamassima,  and  it  is 
73 


HENRY  JAMES 


usually  something  great,  and  as  a  rule  it  is 
doing  it  quite  on  its  own.  As  a  portal  to 
the  disordered  tale  there  stands  one  of  the 
finest  short  stories  in  the  world ;  how  Miss 
Pynsent,  the  shabby  little  dressmaker  who 
has  brought  up  Hyacinth,  the  bastard  child 
of  a  French  work-girl  now  in  Millbank  for 
the  murder  of  the  peer  who  betrayed  her, 
is  suddenly  bidden  to  bring  the  boy  to  his 
mother's  prison  deathbed,  and  how  the  poor 
woman  drags  him  up  to  the  brown,  window- 
less  walls,  the  vast  blank  gate,  the  looming 
corridors  infused  with  sallow  light,  is  such  a 
study  of  the  way  the  institutions  devised 
by  man  in  the  interests  of  justice  and  order 
make  a  child's  soul  scream,  that  the  reader 
will  for  ever  after  think  a  great  deal  less  of 
Pip's  adventures  on  the  marshes  in  Great 
Expectations.  Dickens  could  never  have 
suffused  his  story  with  so  exquisite  and  so 
relevant  an  emotional  effect  as  the  aching 
of  poor  Miss  Pynsent' s  heart  over  this  rough 
introduction  of  her  cherished  lamb  to  the 
horrible ;  nor  could  he  have  invented  that 
wonderful  moment  when  the  child  turns 
74 


TRANSITION 


from  the  ravenous  embrace  of  the  wasted 
and  disfigured  stranger  with,  "  I  won't  kiss 
her;  Pinnie  says  she  stole  a  watch!"  at 
which  the  murderess  screams,  "  A  h  !  quette 
infamie !  I  never  stole  anything!"  and 
tLe  wardress  says  with  dignity:  "I'm  sure 
you  needn't  put  more  on  her  than  she  has 
by  rights,"  to  which  the  poor  virgin,  quite 
unable  to  understand  the  peculiar  cachet 
attaching  to  a  crime  passionel,  cries  con- 
tritely, "  Mercy,  more !  I  thought  it  so 
much  less ! " 

And  from  this  portal  the  book  goes  on  to 
incidents  and  persons  not  less  exquisite  but 
still  disconcertingly  mere  portals.  It  is  as 
though  in  a  mad  dream  one  found  oneself 
passing  through  the  arch  in  the  mellow 
redness  of  Hampton  Court  and  straightway 
emerged  on  the  colonnade  of  St  Paul's, 
through  whose  little  swing-doors  one  surpris- 
ingly stepped  to  the  prim  front  of  Kensington 
Palace.  There  is  M.  Poupin,  the  exiled 
Communist  who  cannot  communicate  with 
the  world,  or  the  moustached  female  com- 
panion with  whom  he  dwells  in  a  scrupu- 
75 


HENRY  JAMES 


lously  unmarried  state,  save  by  platitudes 
concerning  the  social  organisation :  "I'm 
suffering  extremely,  but  we  must  all  suffer 
so  long  as  the  social  question  is  so  abomin- 
ably, so  iniquitously  neglected,"  is  his  way 
of  intimating  a  sore  throat.  There  is  poor 
Lady  Aurora  Langrish,  the  aristocratic 
precursor  of  the  sad  Miss  Huxtables  in  The 
Madras  House  :  "  My  father  isn't  rich,  and 
there's  only  one  of  us,  Eva,  married,  and 
we're  not  at  all  handsome.  .  .  .  They  go 
into  the  country  all  the  autumn,  all  the 
winter,  when  there's  no  one  here  (except 
three  or  four  millions)  and  the  rain  drips, 
drips,  drips  from  the  trees  in  the  big  dull 
park  where  my  people  live,  and  nothing  to 
do  but  to  go  out  with  three  or  four  others 
in  mackintoshes.  ..."  There  is  dry  old 
Mr  Vetch  who  plays  the  fiddle  in  the 
orchestra  at  night  and  fills  all  the  rest  of  the 
empty  day  with  love  for  Hyacinth ;  and 
there  is  Captain  Sholto,  the  Piccadilly 
swell;  and  Miss  Hennings,  the  Bales-lady, 
and  half-a-dozen  admirable  others  casually 
affixed  by  the  stretched  string  of  circum- 
76 


TRANSITION 


stance  or  the  glue  of  coincidence.  And  quite 
the  preciousest  "  piece"  in  the  collection  is 
the  account  of  how  the  Princess  Casamas- 
sima,  who  is  Christina  Light  of  Roderick 
Hudson,  grown  to  perilous  maturity  of  beauty 
and  perversity,  calls  young  Hyacinth  to  her 
country  house,  and  there  in  the  beechy  park 
and  flowery  lanes  makes  him  talk  of  the  plots 
against  the  rich  which  later  are  to  cause  his 
death,  and  brings  him  nearer  to  it  by  lifting 
a  face  wonderfully  pale  and  pure  with 
enthusiasm.  It  is  so  like  that  Titian  in  the 
Prado  which  shows,  against  a  window  look- 
ing on  a  park  where  lovers  walk  in  golden 
air  under  silver  poplars,  Venus  lying  on  a 
satin  couch  while  a  young  man  makes 
music  for  her  at  an  organ;  her  eyes  are 
softly  intent,  and  the  youth  thinks  she  is 
suspended  over  the  world  in  his  music,  but 
really  she  is  brooding  on  the  whiteness  of 
his  skin  beneath  his  black  beard.  That  like- 
ness suggests  that  The  Princess  Casamassima 
should  be  taken,  not  as  a  novel,  but  as  the 
small,  fine  picture  gallery  that  Mr  James 
thought  fit  to  add  to  his  mental  palace, 
77 


HENRY  JAMES 


already    so    rich    in    mere     sane    living 
rooms. 

It  is  unpleasant  to  travel  in  a  runaway 
motor-car,  even  if  it  ultimately  spills  one 
into  a  rose-garden,  and  when  Mr  James 
produced  a  picture  gallery  when  he  had 
intended  a  grave  study  of  social  differences, 
he  was  in  much  that  case.  But  already  in 
The  Author  ofBeltraffio  (1884)  he  had  shown 
his  awareness  of  a  movement  which  had 
started  with  the  intention  of  destroying 
both  Christian  morality  and  rationalism, 
and  otherwise  making  us  fearfully  gay,  and 
which  actually  achieved  the  slight  mitiga- 
tion of  the  offensiveness  of  plumbers'  shop 
windows  and  the  recovery  by  Mr  Henry 
James  of  control  over  his  machine.  That 
story  is  not  one  of  Mr  James'  best;  the 
author  makes  his  readers  regard  his  scene 
through  so  small  a  peephole  that  even  the 
characters  who  are  to  be  conceived  as  above 
all  retiring  have  to  come  grossly  near  if 
their  audience  is  to  make  anything  of 
the  drama  at  all.  The  theme  is  that  an 
author's  wife  who  considers  her  husband's 
78 


TRANSITION 


books  objectionable  lets  her  child  die  rather 
than  that  he  should  grow  up  in  the  com- 
panionship of  one  so  utterly  without  re- 
serve ;  yet,  since  the  tale  is  told  by  a  total 
stranger  who  is  visiting  them  for  the  week- 
end, she  has  necessarily  to  behave  with  a 
lack  of  reserve  that  makes  her  imputed 
motive  incredible.  The  special  value  of 
the  story  lies  in  the  moments  when  the 
author  of  Beltraffio,  whose  affectation  of  a 
velveteen  coat  and  a  remote  foreign  air 
makes  us  desire  to  scream  out  to  the  week- 
end visitor  that  he  is  being  fooled,  and  this 
is  no  writer  but  an  artistic  photographer, 
remarks  with  some  complacency  that  to 
the  conventional  he  appears  "  no  better 
than  an  ancient  Greek"  and  professes  a 
thirst  for  "  the  cultivation  of  beauty  with- 
out reserve  or  precautions."  Our  happy 
generation  cannot  understand  these  phrases 
which  doubtless  had  their  salutary  meaning 
for  that  distant  day  when  England  fed  her- 
self on  so  low  a  diet  that  Jude  the  Obscure 
seejcaed  to  her  a  maddening  draught.  But 
they  interest  us  by  showing  that  even  Mr 
79 


HENKY  JAMES 


James,  who  ordinarily  turned  aside  with 
so  chill  a  wince  from  the  ridiculous,  had 
exposed  his  consciousness  to  the  aesthetic 
movement  which  had  been  remotely  en- 
gendered by  Leigh  Hunt's  Cockney  crow 
of  joy  at  Italy  and  afterwards  fostered  by 
Euskin  as  one  of  his  wild  repartees  to  the 
railway  train,  and  which  was  then  being 
given  the  middle-class  touch  by  Oscar 
Wilde. 

We  feel  surprised  at  Mr  James'  cognisance 
of  anything  so  second-rate  as  this  Decadent 
Movement  of  the  late  eighties  and  early 
nineties,  because  most  of  us  basely  judge  it 
by  its  lack  of  worldly  success  instead  of  by 
its  moral  mission.  The  elect  of  the  move- 
ment, if  one  delves  in  the  memory  of  older 
Londoners,  were  certainly  silly  young  men 
who  were  careful  about  the  laundering  of 
their  evening  shirts  and  who  tried  to  intro- 
duce the  tone  of  public -school  life  into 
ordinary  society.  And  it  is  true  that  for  all 
their  talk  of  art  they  produced  nothing  but 
one  good  farce  and  a  cartload  of  such  weak, 
sweet  verse  as  schoolgirls  copy  into  exercise- 
80 


TRANSITION 


books,  and  that  from  this  small  effort  they 
sank  exhausted  down  to  prison,  drink, 
madness,  suicide ;  and  struck  whatever  other 
notes  there  be  in  the  descending  scale  of 
personal  disgrace.  And  yet,  for  all  its 
fruitlessness,  that  prattle  about  art  gave 
them  a  valid  claim  on  our  respect.  Never 
had  beauty  been  so  forgotten;  style  was 
poisoned  at  the  fount  of  thought  by  Car- 
lyle,  whose  sentences  were  confused  dis- 
asters like  railway  accidents,  and  by  Herbert 
Spencer,  who  wrote  as  though  he  were  the 
offspring  of  two  Times  leaders;  among 
novelists  only  Robert  Louis  Stevenson  loved 
words,  and  he  had  too  prudent  a  care  to 
water  down  his  gruel  to  suit  sick  England's 
stomach ;  and  in  cricicism  Andrew  Lang, 
who  had  admired  Scott  and  Dickens  in  his 
schooldays  and  was  not  going  to  let  himself 
down  by  admiring  anybody  nearer  his  own 
generation,  greeted  every  exponent  of  the 
real  with  a  high  piercing  northern  sneer. 
It  was  of  inestimable  value  that  it  should  be 
cried,  no  matter  in  how  pert  a  voice,  that 
words  are  jewels  which,  wisely  set,  make  by 
F  81 


HE^RY  JAMES 


their  shining  mental  light.  That  the  cry 
could  not  save  the  young  men  who  raised  it, 
bore  out  their  contention  of  the  time's  need 
for  it;  if  they,  seeking  new  beauty,  could 
but  celebrate  the  old  dingy  sins  of  towns,  it 
showed  in  what  a  base  age  they  had  been 
bred.  And  if  they  could  not  save  them- 
selves they  saved  others.  Arnold  Bennett 
and  H.  G.  Wells  set  off  in  the  nineties  in  a 
world  encouragingly  full  of  talk  about  good 
writing.  Conrad,  mouthing  his  difficult 
strange  tales  about  the  sea,  found  an 
audience  that  would  sit  hushed.  And  in 
the  brain  of  one  who,  being  then  between 
forty  and  fifty  years  of  age,  might  have  been 
thought  inaccessible  to  new  conceptions  of 
the  art  that  had  for  so  long  preoccupied  him, 
there  passed  important  thoughts. 

"  That  idea  I  picked  up  when  I  corrected 
George  Eliot's  proofs,  oh  !  so  long  ago  !  " 
one  can  imagine  Mr  James  saying,  "  that 
idea  that  art  must  be  ballasted  by  didactic- 
ism can't  be  true  for  me.  I've  fined  it 
down,  in  my  reading  of  the  French,  to  an 
opinion  that  the  artist  should  use  his  fancy 
82 


TRANSITION 


work  to  decorate  useful  articles ;  but  still 
it  isn't  true  for  me.  For  I  must,  before  I 
can  decorate  them,  make  the  useful  articles 
of  thought  my  own,  and  they  are  just  the 
one  thing  that  for  all  my  mental  wealth  I 
can't  acquire.  I  see  them  often  enough  in 
the  shop-windows — the  moral  and  political 
and  philosophical  problems  so  prodigiously 
produced  by  my  age — and  many  times  have 
tried  the  door,  but  to  my  touch  it  never 
opens,  so  I  have  to  describe  them  as  I  see 
them  through  the  glass,  without  having  felt 
or  known  them  with  the  intimacy  of  posses- 
sion !  It's  true  I  did  once  deal  with  a 
situation  in  the  history  of  two  peoples,  but 
I  see  now  that  in  its  international  character 
there  was  an  intimation  that  it  was  the  last 
with  which  I  should  ever  effectively  concern 
myself.  For  I'm  destructively  not  national; 
my  mind  is  engraved  with  the  sights  and 
social  customs  of  half-a-dozen  countries, 
and  with  the  deep  traditions  of  not  one,  and 
how  can  I  deal  deeply  with  the  conduct  of  a 
people  when  I  haven't  a  notion  of  the  quality 
or  quantity  of  the  traditions  which  are, 
83 


HENRY  JAMES 


after  all,  its  mainspring?  It  seems  to  me 
that  the  cry  of  "  Art  for  Art's  sake,"  which 
is  being  raised  by  those  young  men,  and 
which  certainly  isn't  true  for  them,  may  be 
true  for  me.  What  if  henceforth  I  release 
the  winged  steed  of  my  recording  art  from 
the  obligation  of  dragging  up  the  steep  hill 
of  my  inaptitude  the  dray  filled  with  the 
heavy  goods  which  I  have  amassed  in  my 
perhaps  so  mistaken  desire  for  a  respectably 
weighty  subject,  and  let  the  poor  thing  just 
beautifully  soar  ?  " 

One  perceives  how  far  this  mood  had  gone 
with  Mr  James  when  the  hero  of  The  Tragic 
Muse  (1890)  refuses  a  seat  in  Parliament 
and  the  hand  of  a  wealthy  widow  in  order 
that  he  might  go  on  painting.  From  Mr 
James,  to  whom  marrying  a  widow  appeared 
as  much  superior  to  marrying  a  spinster 
as  privately  acquiring  a  "  piece"  from  the 
dispersed  collection  of  a  deceased  connois- 
seur of  repute  is  to  buying  old  furniture 
with  no  guarantee  but  one's  own  approval, 
this  was  a  portentous  incident.  And  there 
is  vast  significance  in  his  sympathetic  re- 
84 


TKANSITION 


presentation  of  Miriam  Eooth,  the  young 
actress  to  whom  the  title  refers,  for  before 
this  period  he  would  never  have  accepted 
the  genius  of  the  black-browed,  untidy  girl 
as  an  excuse  for  her  lack  of  money  and  social 
position  and  manners.  It  had  hitherto  been 
his  grimly  expressed  opinion  that  "  the  life 
of  a  woman  is  essentially  an  affair  of  private 
relations,"  and  he  had  refused  to  dramatise 
in  his  imagination  anything  concerning 
women  save  their  failures  and  successes  as 
sexual  beings  ;  which  is  like  judging  a  cutlet 
not  by  its  flavour,  but  by  the  condition  of  its 
pink -paper  frill.  That  time  had  gone.  He 
had  abandoned  all  his  prejudices  in  despair, 
and  for  many  years  to  come  was  to  show 
a  divine  charity,  freely  permitting  every 
encountered  thing  to  impress  its  essence  on 
the  receptive  wax  of  his  consciousness. 
For  the  next  twelve  years  "  impressions," 
as  in  his  happy  foreign  childhood,  "  were 
not  merely  all  right,  but  were  the  dearest 
things  in  the  world." 


85 


IV 

THE  CRYSTAL  BOWL 

IN  that  octagonal  room  at  the  Prado, 
where  each  wall  is  an  altar  raised  to 
beauty,  because  it  is  hung  with  pictures 
by  Velasquez,  in  all  the  lesser  works  one 
finds  some  intimation  of  the  grave,  fine 
personality  who  produced  all  this  wonder. 
At  the  sacred  picture  that  was  his  first  one 
says,  "  He  was  a  pupil,  and  very  proud  of 
painting  the  old  things  better  than  the  old 
men  could,  even  though  they  meant  nothing 
to  him"  ;  at  the  squat,  black  dwarfs,  "  He 
was  so  sure  that  the  truth  about  the  world 
was  kind  that  he  could  look  upon  horror 
without  fear  "  ;  and  at  the  sketches  of  the 
Villa  Medici  Gardens,  "  After  hot,  bleak 
Spain  he  loved  Italy  as  one  who  has  known 
passion  loves  a  passionless  girl."  And  the 
recreated  personality,  tangible  enough  to  be 
liked,  passes  with  one  about  the  gallery 
86 


THE  CRYSTAL  BOWL 


until  suddenly,  before  the  masterpieces,  it 
vanishes.  With  those  it  had  nothing  to  do ; 
the  thing  that  was  his  character,  shaped  out 
of  the  innate  traits  of  his  dark  stock  by  the 
raw  beauty  of  the  land  and  the  stiff  rich  life 
of  the  court,  brought  him  to  the  conception 
of  these  works  but  lay  sleeping  through 
their  execution.  When  he  was  painting  Las 
HUanderas  he  knew  nothing  save  that  the 
weavers'  flesh  glowed  golden  in  the  dusty 
sunlight  of  the  factory ;  for  the  state  of 
genius  consists  of  an  utter  surrender  of  the 
mind  to  the  subject.  The  artist  at  the 
moment  of  creation  must  be  like  a  saint 
awaiting  the  embrace  of  God,  scourging 
appetite  out  of  him,  shrinking  from  sensa- 
tion as  though  it  were  a  sin,  deleting  self, 
lifting  his  consciousness  like  an  empty  cup 
to  receive  the  heavenly  draught. 

And  so,  with  the  beginning  of  his  second 
period  of  genius,  the  reading  of  Mr  James 
ceased  to  give  us  the  companionship  of  the 
gentle,  very  pleasant  American  who  seemed 
homeless  but  quite  serene,  as  though  he  were 
tired  of  living  in  his  boxes,  but  on  the  other 
87 


HENRY  JAMES 


hand  was  very  fond  of  travelling,  that  we 
had  grown  to  like  in  his  books  of  the  eighties. 
He  went  away  and  sent  no  letter ;  but 
instead,  with  a  lavishness  one  would  never 
have  suspected  from  his  uneasy  bearing, 
sent  a  succession  of  jewels,  great  globed 
jewels  of  experience,  from  which  marvel- 
lously conceived  characters  gave  out  their 
milky  gleams  or  fiery  rays.  The  first  tenta- 
tive try  at  the  mere  impression,  The  Aspern 
Papers  (1888),  gave  an  earnest  of  his  gener- 
osity. There  one  passes  into  the  golden 
glow  of  Venice,  "  where  the  sky  and  the  sea 
and  the  rosy  air  and  the  marble  of  the 
palaces  all  shimmer  and  melt  together.  .  .  . 
The  gondola  stopped,  the  old  palace  was 
there.  .  .  .  How  charming !  it's  grey  and 
pink !  "  And  under  the  painted  ceiling  of 
the  old  palace  sits  bleached  and  shrivelled 
Juliana  Bordereau,  the  memory  of  her  love 
affair  with  the  great  poet  Aspern  hanging 
in  the  air  like  incense  and  filling  the  mind 
with  tears  that  such  splendid  lovers  buy  no 
immortality,  but  grow  old  like  the  rest. 
Above  its  mere  amusing  story  the  tale 
88 


THE  CRYSTAL  BOWL 


breathes  an  elegy  on  the  many  good  things 
that  are  slain  by  age  before  death  comes  and 
decently  inters  the  body.  For  one  watches, 
with  a  kind  of  comic  horror  that  such 
grimaces  should  touch  the  face  that  Jeffery 
Aspern  kissed,  the  grin  of  senile  irony  with 
which  she  meets  the  young  American  who 
comes  to  wheedle  her  lover's  letters  out  of 
her,  with  which  she  wheedles  money  out  of 
him  that  she  may  provide  for  the  future  of 
the  poor  spinster  niece  who  moves  tremu- 
lously about  her  chair  like  a  silly  baaing 
sheep ;  with  which,  one  thinks,  she  possibly 
anticipates  the  dreadful  moment  after  her 
death  when  the  spinster  dodderingly  in- 
forms the  American  that  she  could  give  him 
her  aunt's  papers  only  "  if  you  were  a 
relation  .  .  .  if  you  weren't  a  stranger. . . ." 
Every  drop  of  beauty  is  squeezed  out  of  the 
material  by  a  pressure  so  cool  and  con- 
trolled that,  remembering  how  Benvenuto 
Cellini  "  fell  in  his  clothes  and  slept"  after 
he  had  taken  similar  small  masterpieces  from 
the  furnace,  one  waits  for  his  exhaustion. 
But  it  was  given  to  Mr  James,  perhaps 


HENRY  JAMES 


because  he  was  an  American  and  so  of  a 
stock  oxygenated  by  contact  with  the  free 
airs  of  the  new  free  lands,  to  swim  longer  jn 
the  sea  of  perfection  than  any  other  writer. 
It  was  not  until  fifteen  years  later,  when 
he  was  old  and  the  disciples  of  the  move- 
ment which  had  stimulated  him  all  shabbily 
dead,  and  talk  about  art  locked  away  in  a 
dusty  cupboard  with  the  Japanese  fans  and 
the  blue  china  pots,  that  he  turned  tired  and 
came  to  shore. 

He  was  sustained  in  this  long  swim  by 
two  beloved  subjects,  one  bitter  and  one 
sweet.  The  literary  life  was  written  about 
in  those  days  almost  as  much  as  it  was 
talked  about,  and  it  was  continually  being 
used  by  the  young  decadents  as  the  occa- 
sion for  predictions  of  their  own  later 
squalor  in  which  morphia  and  dark  ladies, 
moulded  in  the  likeness  of  beautiful  young 
Mrs  Patrick  Campbell,  played  parts  which 
in  the  subsequent  realisation  were  taken  by 
plain  beer  and  plainer  barmaids.  Mr  James 
took  up  the  poor,  scribbled-about  thing 
and  turned  it  over  very  reverently,  none 
90 


THE  CRYSTAL  BOWL 


knowing  better  than  he  that  the  artist  was 
the  sacer  vales  of  his  time,  and  very  sadly, 
because  he  had  now  close  on  thirty  years  of 
intimacy  with  artists  behind  him.  He  had 
known  Turgeniev,  the  most  "  beautiful 
genius "  of  his  age,  and  had  found  him 
rather  lonely  and  pre-eminently  not  eminent 
in  the  eyes  of  the  world ;  he  had  seen  the 
dark  days  of  Rossetti ;  he  had  trod  so  close 
on  the  heels  of  Alfred  de  Musset  as  to  know 
that  il  s'absente  trop  de  I' Academic  parcequ'il 
s' absinthe  trop  ;  he  had  seen  poor,  fat  little 
Zola,  who  thought  that  though  one  could 
not  build  Rome  in  a  day  one  could  describe 
it  in  less,  plodding  and  sweating  up  the 
wrong  road  to  art.  And  so,  in  a  mood  of 
clear  melancholy,  with  an  occasional  flash 
of  irony  which  was  doubtless  the  sole  com- 
ment wrung  from  his  urbanity  by  the  fact 
that  that  age,  when  the  change  of  the 
novel's  price  from  thirty -one  and  sixpence  to 
six  shillings  had  enormously  increased  the 
reading  public,  had  brought  no  enlargement 
of  his  circle  of  readers,  he  wrote  that 
wonderful  series  of  stories  which  began  with 
91 


HENRY  JAMES 


TheLesson  of  the  Master  (1888)  and  included 
The  Middle  Years  (1893),  The  Next  Time 
(1895),  and  The  Death  of  the  Lion  (1894). 
Save  for  that  roaring  joke,  The  Coxon  Fund 
(1894),  where  one  sees  Frank  Saltram,a  "free 
rearrangement  of  Coleridge,"  charming 
and  sponging  on  the  rich,  bringing  into  their 
drawing-rooms  a  swaying  body  that  should 
be  taken  home  at  once  in  a  cab  and  a  mind 
"  like  a  crystal  suspended  in  the  moral 
world — swinging  and  shining  and  flashing 
there,"  these  are  all  sad  stories.  The 
master  is  bullied  out  of  being  a  master  by 
the  financial  importunities  of  a  smart  wife 
and  comely  children;  the  author  of  The 
Middle  Years  dies  with  none  but  an  acquaint- 
ance picked  up  at  the  seaside  to  hold  his 
hand ;  Ealph  Limbert  is  killed  by  worry 
because  he  could  not  stop  producing  master- 
pieces when  it  was  the  damned  marketable 
asset  that  was  required  to  pay  the  wages  of 
his  wife's  maid ;  the  lion  dies  in  a  cold 
country  house,  with  no  fire  in  his  bedroom, 
while  his  hostess  gets  paragraphed  for  her 
charity  to  the  wild  literary,  and  his  last 
92 


THE  CRYSTAL  BOWL 


manuscript  goes  astray  downstairs  some- 
where between  Lord  Dorimont's  man  and 
Lady  Augusta's  maid.  One  knows  next  to 
nothing  at  all  about  the  faith  consciously 
rejected  or  adopted  by  Henry  James,  and 
whether  the  atmosphere  of  speculative  theo- 
logy in  which  he  was  bred  had  made  him 
think  religion  as  far  beyond  his  mental  range 
as  mathematics,  or  whether  Christianity 
seemed  to  him  just  the  excuse  of  the  Latin 
races  for  building  high  cool  places,  very 
grateful  in  the  heat,  and  filling  them  with 
incense  and  images  of  kind,  interceding 
people.  But  in  this  melancholy  series,  and 
indeed  in  all  his  later  works — for  right  on 
to  The  Golden  Bowl  (1905)  he  presents  his 
characters  as  being  worthy  of  treatment  just 
because  they  are  in  some  way  or  other 
struggling  to  preserve  some  decency  from 
engulfment  in  the  common  lot  of  nastiness 
—one  perceives  that  he  had  been  born  with 
the  grim  New  England  faith  like  a  cold  drop 
in  his  blood.  The  earth  was  a  vale  of  tears, 
and  all  one  could  do  was  to  go  on,  unin-  / 
fluenced  by  weeping  or  the  fear  of  weeping, 
93 


HENRY  JAMES 


to  some  high  goal.  This  sad  belief,  accom- 
panied by  so  intense  a  consciousness  that 
his  particular  goal,  the  art  of  great  writing, 
was  reached  by  a  stonier  and  longer  path 
than  any,  might  have  been  expected  to  pro- 
voke him  rather  to  the  fury  of  Landor  or 
the  gloomy  pomposity  of  Wordsworth  than 
to  the  unhurried,  unimpassioned  production 
of  these  wonderful  stories,  these  exquisite 
vessels  that  swaggeringly  hold  and  clearly 
show  the  contained  draught  of  truth,  like 
tall-stemmed  goblets  of  Venetian  glass. 
But  glass  is  the  wrong  image ;  for  no  hand 
could  ever  break  these,  no  critical  eye  detect 
a  crack.  They  are  so  truthfully  conceived 
that  one  could  compare  them  only  to  some 
nobly  infrangible  substance,  so  realistic  and 
yet  so  charged  with  significance  by  their 
fashioning  that  their  likeness  must  be  some- 
thing which  is  transparent  and  yet  gives  the 
light  a  white  fire  as  it  passed  through.  It 
is  of  crystal  they  are  made,  hard,  luminous 
crystal. 

Mr  James'  second  subject,  which  began 
to  show  its  white  flowers  in  The  Other  House 
94 


THE  CRYSTAL  BOWL 


(1896)  and  went  on  blossoming  long  after 
winter  had  fallen  on  his  genius  in  The  Golden 
Bowl,  also  showed  him  a  son  of  New  England. 
For  it  consists  of  nothing  else  than  the 
demonstration,  in  varying  and  exquisitely 
selected  circumstances,  that  blessed  are  the 
pure  in  heart ;  and  that  was  certainly  the 
beatitude  that  New  England,  with  its  fear 
of  passion  and  publicity  and  its  respect  for 
spinsters  and  pastors  of  bleached  lives,  most 
regarded.  Mr  James  demonstrated  it  in 
no  spirit  of  moral  propaganda,  but  for  the 
technical  reason  that  a  situation  is  greatly 
elucidated  if  one  of  the  persons  engaged 
presents  a  consciousness  like  a  polished  silver 
surface,  unobscured  by  any  tracery  of  selfish 
preoccupations,  which  clearly  mirrors  the 
other  participients  and  their  movements. 
Perhaps  he  thereby  discovered  the  real  mean- 
ing of  the  beatitude,  which  may  be  no  more 
than  an  expression  of  the  obvious  truth  that 
he  who  receives  the  fullest  impression  of 
the  world  is  likely  to  react  most  valuably 
to  it.  Certainly  he  invented  a  technical 
trick  which  in  its  way  was  as  important  as 
95 


HENRY  JAMES 


the  discovery  which  Ibsen  was  making  about 
the  same  time  and  which  he  himself  used 
later  in  his  last  masterpiece,  that  if  one  had 
a  really  "  great "  scene  one  ought  to  leave  it 
out  and  describe  it  simply  by  the  full  relation 
of  its  consequences.  He  showed  that  all  sorts 
of  things  that  are  amusing  enough  to  write 
about  and  are  yet  too  ignoble  for  dignified 
art  are  lent  the  required  nobility  by  being 
witnessed  by  grave  candour ;  and  that  char- 
acters whose  special  claim  is  that  they  are 
"  strange,"  but  whose  strangeness  cannot  be 
laboured  by  direct  description  lest  they  be- 
come crude,  can  have  the  gaps  in  their  repre- 
sentation filled  out  by  their  effect  on  the 
simple.  Rose  Armiger,  in  The  Other  House, 
is  made  much  more  horrible  because  she 
exposes  her  dreadful  passion  before  the 
simplicity  of  Tony  Bream,  just  as  a  striped 
poisonous  snake  would  seem  more  striped 
and  poisonous  if  it  flickered  its  black  fang 
from  an  English  rose-bush.  The  awfulness 
of  Ida  Farange,  whose  handsome  appear- 
ance constituted  "  an  abuse  of  visibility," 
of  Beale  Farange,  whose  vast  scented  beard 
96 


THE  CRYSTAL  BOWL 


was,  since  odd  ladies  liked  to  play  with  it, 
ultimately  his  chief  source  of  income,  would 
never  have  been  important  enough  to  be 
recorded  if  they  had  not  formed  a  part  of 
What  Maisie  Knew  (1897) ;  and  the  en- 
snarement  of  Sir  Claude,  her  first  step- 
parent, who  was  such  a  good  fellow  to  talk 
to  when  his  gaze  didn't  wander  to  the  dark 
young  woman  in  red  who  was  sweeping  into 
dinner  or  to  the  shining  limbs  of  a  Dieppe 
fishwife,  by  the  beautiful,  genteel  young 
trollop  who  was  her  second  step-parent, 
would  have  been  a  matter  too  louche  for 
representation  if  Maisie  had  not  so  beauti- 
fully cared  for  him.  The  battle  over  The 
Spoils  of  Poynton  (1897),  where  the  greedy 
mother  tries  to  defend  the  fine  "  things" 
of  her  dead  husband's  house  from  her 
imbecile  son's  vulgar  bride,  would  be  too 
unrelievedly  a  history  of  greed  to  be  borne 
were  not  exquisite  Fleda  Vetch  in  the  fore- 
ground, being  fond  of  the  mother,  loving  the 
son.  The  best  ghost  story  in  the  world, 
The  Turn  of  the  Screw  (1898),  is  the  more 
ghostly  because  the  apparitions  of  the  valet 
Q  97 


HENRY  JAMES 


and  the  governess,  appearing  at  the 
dangerous  place,  the  top  of  the  tower  on  the 
other  side  of  the  lake,  that  they  may  tempt 
the  children  they  corrupted  in  their  lives  to 
join  them  in  their  eternal  torment,  are  seen 
by  the  clear  eyes  of  the  honourable  and  fear- 
less lady  who  tells  the  tale.  And  In  the 
Cage  (1898)  has  no  subject  but  the  purity 
of  the  romantic  little  telegraphist  who  sits 
behind  the  wire  netting  at  the  grocer's. 
Her  heart  is  like  a  well  of  clear  water, 
through  which,  when  the  handsome  Guards- 
man comes  in  to  send  a  telegram  to  his 
mistress,  love  strikes  down  like  a  shaft  of 
light. 

One  pauses,  horrified  to  find  oneself  tick- 
ing off  these  masterpieces  on  one's  fingers, 
as  though  they  were  so  many  books  by  Mrs 
Humphry  Ward  or  buns  by  Lyons.  And 
yet  what  can  one  do  ?  Criticism  must  break 
down  when  it  comes  to  masterpieces.  For 
if  one  is  creative  one  wants  to  go  away  and 
spend  oneself  utterly  on  this  sacred  business 
of  creation,  wring  out  of  oneself  every  drop 
of  this  inestimable  thing  art ;  and  if  one  is 
98 


THE  CKYSTAL  BOWL 


not  creative  one  can  only  put  out  a  tremu- 
lous finger  to  touch  the  marvellous  shining 
crystal,  and  be  silent  with  wonder.  Deep 
wonder,  since  these  are  not,  as  fools  have  pre- 
tended, merely  rich  treatments  of  the  trivial. 
For  although  he  could  not  grasp  a  compli- 
cated abstraction,  was  teased  by  the  impli- 
cations of  a  great  cause,  and  angered  by  an 
idea  that  could  be  understood  only  by  the 
synthesis  of  many  references,  he  could  dive 
down  serenely,  like  a  practised  diver  going 
under  the  sea  for  pearls,  into  the  twilit 
depths  of  the  heart  to  seize  his  secrets. 
There  is  in  humanity  an  instinct  for  ritual, 
there  lies  in  all  of  us  a  desire  to  commemor- 
ate our  deep  emotions,  that  would  otherwise 
glow  in  our  bosoms  and  die  down  for  ever, 
by  some  form  that  adds  to  the  beauty  of 
the  world ;  but  there  is  only  one  expression 
of  it  in  literature  that  is  not  poisonously 
silly.  Newman  and  the  Tractarians  and 
Monsignor  Benson  make  the  ritualist  seem 
as  big  a  fool  as  the  old  woman  who  carries  a 
potato  in  her  pocket  to  ward  off  rheumat- 
ism. Sabatier  makes  him  seem  the  kind  of 
99 


HENRY  JAMES 


person  who  takes  sugar  in  his  tea,  paints  in 
water-colour  and  likes  The  Roadmender. 
But  there  is  a  story  by  Henry  James  called 
The  Altar  of  the  Dead,  rejected  again  and 
again  by  the  caste  of  cretins  who  edit  the 
magazines  and  reviews  of  this  unhappy 
country,  although  of  so  perfect  a  beauty 
that  one  can  read  every  separate  paragraph 
every  day  of  one's  life  for  the  music  of  the 
sentences  and  the  loveliness  of  the  pre- 
sented images,  which  takes  ritual  from  the 
trembling  hands  of  the  coped  old  men  and 
exhibits  it  as  something  that  those  who  love 
the  natural  frame  of  things  and  hate  super- 
stition need  not  fear  to  accept.  It  tells 
how  an  ageing  man  acquires  an  altar  in  a 
Roman  Catholic  church  and  burns  at  it 
candles  to  his  many  dead,  and  by  worship- 
ping there  keeps  so  close  company  with  their 
charity  and  sweetness  that,  at  his  end,  the 
blaze  of  white  lights  inspires  him  to  a  last 
supreme  act  of  forgiveness  to  an  enemy; 
and  the  beautiful  recital  makes  one's  mind 
no  longer  fear  to  admit  that  the  splendour 
of  a  Cathedral  Mass  may,  although  one's 
100 


THE  CRYSTAL  BOWL 


unbelief  fly  like  an  arrow  through  the  show 
and  transfix  even  the  Cross  itself,  fulfil  a 
noble  need.  Once  at  least  Henry  James 
poured  into  his  crystal  goblet  the  red  wine 
that  nourishes  the  soul. 

And  it  held,  too,  a  liberal  draught  of  the 
least  trivial  distillation  of  man's  mind,  which 
is  tragedy,  in  The  Wings  of  the  Dove  (1902). 
That  story  is  the  perfect  example  of  what 
he  had  declared  in  The  Tragic  Muse  the 
artistic  performance  should  always  be : 
"  the  application,  clear  and  calculated, 
crystal-firm,  as  it  were,  of  the  idea  conceived 
in  the  glow  of  experience,  of  suffering,  of 
joy."  For  Milly  Theale,  the  American 
heiress,  "  who  had  arts  and  idiosyncrasies 
of  which  no  great  account  could  have  been 
given,  but  which  were  a  daily  grace  if  you 
lived  with  them ;  such  as  the  art  of  being 
almost  tragically  impatient  and  yet  making 
it  light  as  air;  of  being  inexplicably  sad 
and  yet  making  it  clear  as  noon ;  of  being 
unmistakably  sad  and  yet  making  it  soft 
as  dusk,"  whose  hopeful  progress  through 
Europe  stops  suddenly  at  the  dark  portal 
101 


HENRY  JAMES 


in  Harley  Street,  is  but  the  ghost  of  Mary 
Temple,  whose  death  thirty  years  before 
had  been  felt  by  Henry  and  William  James 
as  the  end  of  their  youth.  All  those  years 
he  had  held  in  his  heart  the  memory  of  that 
poor  girl,  "  conscious  of  a  great  capacity  for 
life,  but  early  stricken  and  doomed,  con- 
demned to  die  under  short  respite  while  also 
enamoured  of  the  world;  aware,  moreover,  of 
the  condemnation  and  passionately  desiring 
to  '  put  in '  before  extinction  as  many  of  the 
finer  vibration  as  possible  and  so  achieve, 
however  briefly  and  brokenly,  the  sense  of 
having  lived  "  ;  but  with  the  prescience  of 
the  artist  he  had  delayed  until  he  had  per- 
fected his  art  to  undertake  the  heavy  task  of 
presenting  her  tragedy  without  mitigation 
and  yet  making  it  bearable  and  beautiful. 
Then  he  lavished  his  technical  resources  on 
her  history  as  he  might  have  laid  flowers  on 
her  grave.  There  is  nothing  more  miracu- 
lous in  all  his  works  than  the  way  he  con- 
trives that,  when  her  agony  becomes  too 
great  to  be  directly  represented  and  has  to 
be  suggested  by  its  effect  upon  others,  he 
102 


THE  CRYSTAL  BOWL 


yet  breaks  no  link  of  the  intimacy  between 
the  reader  and  his  heroine,  but  provides 
that  her  increasing  physical  absence  shall 
be  so  compensated  for  by  her  spiritual 
presence  that  her  rare  appearances  are  like 
long-expected  visits  from  a  distant  friend. 
One's  knowledge  of  her  glows  into  love  when 
one  sees  her  holding  a  reception  in  the  faded 
golden  splendours  of  the  Venetian  palace  to 
which  she  has  dragged  herself  to  die,  smiling 
bravely  at  her  guests,  bidding  musicians 
strike  up  to  keep  them  gay,  playing,  to  pre- 
serve her  hands  from  any  gesture  of  anguish 
or  appearance  of  lassitude,  with  the  rope 
of  pearls  that  seems  to  weigh  down  her 
wasted  body.  Yet  one  gets  one's  vision 
through  the  hard,  envious  eyes  of  Kate 
Croy,  who  is  the  hawk  circling  over  the  poor 
dying  dove,  and  the  appalled  gaze  of  Merton 
Densher,  Kate's  secret  lover,  whom  she  has 
trapped  into  a  profession  of  love  for  Milly 
so  that  the  deluded  girl  will  leave  him  her 
fortune.  And  one  sees  her  most  radiantly 
of  all  in  the  interview  which  she  grants  to 
Densher  when  she  has  discovered  the  cruel 
103 


HENRY  JAMES 


fraud  practised  on  her  and  is  dying  of  the 
knowledge,  although  one  is  told  no  more 
than  that  "  she  received  me  just  as  usual, 
in  that  glorious  great  salone,  in  the  dress  she 
always  wears,  from  her  inveterate  corner  of 
her  sofa."  From  the  love  it  lit  in  his  heart, 
a  love  so  great  that  for  very  shame  Kate 
cannot  marry  him  even  when  her  machina- 
tions have  achieved  complete  success  at 
Milly's  death,  one  perceives  that  this  was 
the  dying  girl's  assumption,  that  her  sweet- 
ness and  strength  must  at  that  hour  have 
flowered  so  divinely  that  the  skies  opened 
and  they  were  no  longer  matter  for  a  human 
history.  But  about  this  masterpiece,  too, 
there  can  be  nothing  said.  One  just  sits 
and  looks  up,  while  the  Master  lifts  his  old 
grief,  changed  by  his  craftsmanship  into 
eternal  beauty  as  the  wafer  is  changed  to  the 
Host  by  the  priest's  liturgy,  enclosed  from 
decay,  prisoned  in  perfection,  in  the  great 
shining  crystal  bowl  of  his  art. 


104 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

THE  signs  of  age  appeared  in  Mr 
James'  work  like  white  streaks  in 
a  black  beard ;  between  two  vital 
and  vigorous  books  there  would  appear  one 
that  in  its  garrulity  and  complacent  sur- 
render to  mannerism  predicted  decay.  It 
became  clear,  first  of  all,  that  he  was  no 
longer  able  to  bear  up  with  serenity  under 
his  deep  sense  that  life  was  a  vale  of  tears. 
How  much  he  wished  it  would  all  stop  is 
manifest  in  that  strangest  of  all  visions  of  /'{ 
Paradise,  The  Great  Good  Place  (1900).  We 
all  have  our  hopes  of  what  gifts  the  hereafter 
may  bring  us,  and  in  most  cases  we  desire 
some  compensation  for  the  limitations  of 
our  human  knowledge;  we  promise  our- 
selves that  when  we  lean  over  the  gold  bar 
of  heaven  a  competent  angel  will  bustle  up, 
clasping  innumerable  divinely  clear  text- 
105 


HENRY  JAMES 


books  under  its  wings,  to  tell  us  absolutely 
everything  about  physics,  with  special  re- 
ference to  the  movements  of  the  heavenly 
bodies  spinning  below.  But  it  is  the  essence 
of  Mr  James'  Paradise  that  there  is  nothing 
there  at  all  but  a  climate,  a  sweet  soft 
climate  in  which  the  most  that  happens  is 
one  of  those  summer  sprinkles  that  brings 
out  smells.  This  fatigue  of  life,  this  hunger 
for  the  peace  of  nothingness,  showed  itself 
in  his  increasing  preference  for  laying  the 
scene  of  his  novels  in  the  great  good  places 
of  this  earth,  where  there  is  nothing  more 
dangerous  in  the  parks  and  on  the  terraces 
than  deer  and  peacocks,  and  nothing  more 
disturbing  to  the  soul  in  the  high  rooms 
and  interminable  galleries  than  well-bred 
women.  It  was  not  a  gain  to  his  art ;  under 
its  influence  he  committed  the  twittering 
over  teacups  which  compose  the  collection 
of  short  stories  called  The  Better  Sort 
(1903),  and  the  incidentally  beautiful  but 
devastatingly  artificial  The  Awkward  Age 
(1899),  in  which  the  reader  is  perpetually 
confused  because  Nanda  Brookenham,  one 
106 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 


of  the  most  charming  of  Mr  James'  "  pure 
in  heart,"  is  wept  over  as  though  she  had 
been  violated  body  and  soul,  when  all  that 
has  happened  is  that  she  has  been  brought 
up  in  a  faster  set  than  the  world  thinks 
desirable  for  a  young  unmarried  girl.  And 
it  was  peculiarly  unfortunate  that,  while  hia 
subjects  grew  flimsier  and  his  settings  more 
impressive,  his  style  became  more  and  more 
elaborate.  With  sentences  vast  as  the 
granite  blocks  of  the  Pyramids  and  a  scene 
that  would  have  made  a  site  for  a  capital 
he  set  about  constructing  a  story  the  size  of 
a  hen-house.  The  type  of  these  unhappier 
efforts  of  Mr  James'  genius  is  The  Sacred 
Fount  (1901),  where,  with  a  respect  for  the 
mere  gross  largeness  and  expensiveness  of 
the  country  house  which  almost  makes  one 
write  the  author  Mr  Jeames,  he  records 
how  a  week-end  visitor  spends  more  in- 
tellectual force  than  Kant  can  have  used 
on  The  Critique  .f  Pure  Reason  in  an 
unsuccessful  attempt  to  discover  whether 
there  exists  between  certain  of  his  fellow- 
guests  a  relationship  not  more  interesting 
107 


HENRY  JAMES 


among  these  vacuous  people  than  it  is 
among  sparrows.  The  finely  wrought  de- 
scriptions of  the  leisured  life  make  one  feel 
as  though  one  sat  in  a  beautiful  old  castle, 
granting  its  beauty  but  not  pleased,  because 
one  is  a  prisoner,  while  the  small,  mean 
story  worries  one  like  a  rat  nibbling  at  the 
wainscot.  One  takes  it  as  significant  that 
the  unnamed  host  and  hostess  of  the  party 
never  appear  save  to  "  give  signals."  The 
tiny,  desperate  figures  this  phrase  shows  to 
the  mind's  eye,  semaphoring  to  each  other 
across  incredibly  extended  polished  vistas 
to  keep  up  their  courage  under  these  loom- 
ing, soaring  vaults,  may  be  taken  as  symbols 
of  the  heart  and  intellect  which  Mr  James 
had  now  forgotten  in  his  elaboration  of  their 
social  envelope. 

But  with  this  method,  as  in  every  form 
of  literary  activity  save  only  playwriting, 
in  which  he  was  rather  worse  than  Sidney 
Grundy  in  much  the  same  way,  Mr  James 
gained  his  radiant  triumphs.  There  could 
be  nothing  more  trivial  than  the  donnde  of 
The  Ambassadors  (1903) ;  there  is  no  dignity 
108 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 


or  significance  in  the  situation  of  Lambert 
Stretlier,  an  American  who  is  engaged,  in 
that  odd  way  common  to  Mr  James'  char- 
acters, to  a  woman  whom  he  certainly  does 
not  love  and  hardly  seems  to  like,  and  goes 
at  her  bidding  to  Paris  to  cut  her  cubbish 
son  clear  from  an  entanglement  with  a 
Frenchwoman.  And  yet  so  artfully  is  the 
tale  displayed  in  the  setting  of  lovely,  clean, 
white  Paris  and  green  France,  lifting  her 
poplars  into  the  serene  strong  light  of  the 
French  sky,  that  the  reader  holds  his  breath 
over  the  story  of  how  Strether  "  had  come 
with  a  view  that  might  have  been  figured  by 
a  clear,  green  liquid,  say,  in  a  neat  glass 
phial ;  and  the  liquid,  once  poured  into  the 
open  cup  of  application,  once  exposed  to  the 
action  of  another  air,  had  begun  to  turn  from 
green  to  red,  or  whatever,  and  might,  for  all 
he  knew,  be  on  its  way  to  purple,  to  black, 
to  yellow"  ;  how,  in  fact,  the  old  "  inter- 
national situation  "  acted  on  the  new  genera- 
tion of  Americans.  But  that  book  is  not 
typical  of  this  period,  for  it  is  singularly  free 
from  those  great  sentences  which  sprawl 
109 


HENRY  JAMES 


over  the  pages  of  The  Golden  Bowl  with  such 
an  effect  of  rank  vegetable  growth  that  one 
feels  that  if  one  took  cuttings  of  them  one 
could  raise  a  library  in  the  garden.  And  it 
is  those  sentences  which  absorb,  at  the  last, 
the  whole  of  Mr  James'  attention. 

For  he  ceased,  as  time  went  on,  to  pay  any 
attention  to  the  emotional  values  of  his 
stories ;  it  is  one  of  the  strangest  things 
about  The  Golden  Bowl  that  the  frame 
on  which  there  hangs  the  most  elaborate 
integument  of  suggestion  and  exposition 
ever  woven  by  the  mind  of  man  is  an  ugly 
and  incompletely  invented  story  about 
some  people  who  are  sexually  mad.  Adam 
Verver,  an  American  millionaire,  buys  an 
Italian  prince  for  his  daughter  Maggie,  and 
in  her  turn  she  arranges  a  marriage  between 
her  father  and  Charlotte,  her  school  friend, 
because  she  thinks  he  may  be  lonely  without 
her.  And  although  it  is  plain  that  people 
who  buy  "  made-up  "  marriages  are  more 
awful  than  the  admittedly  awful  people 
who  buy  "  made-up "  ties,  they  are  pre- 
sented to  one  as  vibrating  exquisitely  to 
110 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 


every  fine  chord  of  life,  as  thinking  about 
each  other  with  the  anxious  subtlety  of 
lovers,  as  so  steeped  in  a  sense  of  one  another 
that  they  invent  a  sea  of  poetic  phrases, 
beautiful  images,  discerning  metaphors  that 
break  on  the  reader's  mind  like  the  unceas- 
ing surf.  And  when  one  tries  to  discover 
from  the  recorded  speeches  of  these  people 
whether  there  was  no  palliation  of  their 
ugly  circumstances  one  finds  that  the 
dialogue,  usually  so  compact  a  raft  for  the 
conveyance  of  the  meaning  of  Mr  James' 
novels,  has  been  smashed  up  on  this  sea 
of  phrases  and  drifts  in,  a  plank  at  a  time, 
on  the  copious  flood: 

"  Maggie  happened  to  learn,  by  some 
other  man's  greeting  of  him,  in  the  bright 
Roman  way,  from  a  street  corner  as  we 
passed,  that  one  of  the  Prince's  baptismal 
names,  the  one  always  used  for  him  among 
his  relations,  was  Amerigo  ;  which — as  you 
probably  don't  know,  however,  even  after 
a  lifetime  of  me — was  the  name,  four 
hundred  years  ago,  or  whenever,  of  the 
pushing  man  who  followed,  across  the  sea, 
111 


HENRY  JAMES 


in  the  wake  of  Columbus  and  succeeded, 
where  Columbus  had  failed,  in  becoming 
godfather,  or  name-father,  to  the  new  con- 
tinent; so  the  thought  of  any  connection 
with  him  can  even  now  thrill  our  artless 
breasts." 


And  as  if  it  was  not  enough  that  these 
people  should  say  literally  unspeakable 
sentences  like  that,  and  do  incredible  things, 
the  phrases  make  them  do  things  which  they 
never  did.  For  the  metaphors  are  so  beauti- 
fully and  completely  presented  to  the  mind 
that  it  retains  them  as  having  as  real 
and  physical  an  existence  as  the  facts. 
When  we  learn  that  the  relationship  between 
Charlotte  and  the  Prince  had  reared  itself 
in  Maggie's  life  like  "  some  wonderful, 
beautiful,  but  outlandish  pagoda,  a  structure 
plated  with  hard,  bright  porcelain,  coloured 
and  figured  and  adorned,  at  the  overhanging 
eaves,  with  silver  bells  that  tinkled  ever  so 
charmingly,  when  stirred  by  chance  airs," 
and  the  simile  is  cunningly  developed  for 
seven  or  eight  hundred  words,  one  is  left 
112 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 


with  a  confused  impression  that  a  pagoda 
formed  part  of  the  furniture  at  Portland 
Place  and  that  Maggie  oddly  elected  to  keep 
her  husband  inside  it.  And  to  cap  it  all 
these  people  are  not  even  human,  for  their 
thoughts  concerning  their  relationships  are 
so  impassioned  and  so  elaborate  that  they 
can  never  have  had  either  energy  or  time 
for  the  consideration  of  anything  else  in  the 
world.  A  race  of  creatures  so  inveterately 
specialist  as  Maggie  Verver  could  never 
have  attained  man's  mastery  over  environ- 
ment, but  would  still  be  specialising  on  the 
cocoa-nut  or  some  such  simple  form  of  diet. 
Decidedly  The  Golden  Bowl  is  not  good 
as  a  novel ;  but  what  it  is  supremely  good 
as  can  be  discovered  when  one  learns  how, 
in  these  later  days,  Mr  James  used  to  com- 
pose his  novels.  He  began  by  dictating  a 
short  draft  which,  even  in  the  case  of  such  a 
cartload  of  apes  and  ivory  as  The  Golden 
Bowl,  might  be  no  longer  than  thirty 
thousand  words.  Then  he  would  take  this 
draft  in  his  hand  and  would  dictate  it  all 
over  again  with  what  he  intended  to  be 
H  113 


HENEY  JAMES 


enlightening  additions,  but  which,  since  the 
mere  act  of  talking  set  all  his  family  on  to 
something  quite  different  from  the  art  of 
letters,  made  it  less  and  less  of  a  novel. 
For  the  James  family  had,  as  was  shown 
by  their  father's  many  reported  phrases,  by 
William  James'  charm  as  a  lecturer,  and  by 
the  social  greatness  of  Robertson  James, 
a  genius  for  conversation.  For  long  years  it 
had  remained  latent  in  Henry  James,  who 
had  in  youth  suffered  much  from  that 
Btockishness  which  often  comes  to  those 
who  are  burning  all  their  energy  for  creative 
purposes  and  have  none  left  for  personal 
display;  but  latterly  it  had  been  liberated 
by  the  consciousness  of  maturity  and  fame. 
At  last  it  became  a  passion  with  him,  and 
he  decided  to  converse,  not  only  with  his 
friends,  but  with  his  public.  This  was  bad 
for  his  novels,  so  long  as  one  considered 
them  as  such,  since  a  novel  should  be  the 
presentation  and  explanation  of  a  subject 
while  a  conversation  is  a  fantasia  of  enter- 
taining phrases  on  themes  the  essentials 
of  which  are  to  some  extent  already  in  the 
114 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 


possession  of  the  interlocutors.     But  once 
one  considers  them  as  a  flow  of  bright  things 
said  about  people  Mr  James  knows  and  that 
one  rather  thinks  one  has  met,  but  is  not 
quite  sure,  one  perceives  that  the  crystal 
bowl  of  Mr   James'   art  was  not,  as  one 
had  feared,  broken.     He  had  but  gilded  its 
clear  sides  with  the  gold  of  his  genius  for 
phrase -making,  and  now,  instead  of  lifting 
it  with  a  priest-like  gesture  to   exhibit  a 
noble  subject,  held  it  on  his  knees  as  a 
treasured  piece  of  bric-a-brac  and  tossed 
into  it,  with  an  increasing  carelessness,  any 
sort  of  subject — a  jewel,  a  rose,  a  bit  of 
string,  a  visiting-card — confident  that  the 
surrounding   golden  .glow   would   lend   it 
beauty.     Indiscriminately  he  dropped  into 
it    his    precious   visions  of    his    revisited 
motherland,  in  The  American  Scene  (1907) ; 
the  dry  little  anecdotes  of  The  Finer  Grain 
(1910) ;   the  tittering  triviality  of  The  Out- 
cry (1911) ;    and  his  judgment  of  his  own 
works  in  the  prefaces  to  the  New  York 
edition  of  the  Novels  and  Tales  of  Henry 
James  (1908-1909). 

115 


HENKY  JAMES 


Always  it  was  good,  rambling  talk, 
although  fissured  now  and  then  with  an  old 
man's  lapses  into  tiresomeness,  when  he  split 
hairs  until  there  were  no  longer  any  hairs  to 
split  and  his  mental  gesture  became  merely 
the  making  of  agitated  passes  over  a 
complete  baldness. 

And  here  and  there  the  prose  achieves 
a  beauty  of  its  own ;  but  it  is  no  longer 
the  beauty  of  a  living  thing,  but  rather 
the  "  made"  beauty  which  bases  its  claims 
to  admiration  chiefly  on  its  ingenuity,  like 
those  crystal  clocks  with  jewelled  works 
and  figures  moving  as  the  hours  chimed, 
which  were  the  glory  of  mediaeval  palaces. 

William  James  died  in  1910,  and  Henry 
James,  who  had  already  begun  to  savour 
the  bitterness  of  outliving  brothers  and 
friends  and  pets,  whiled  away  the  next  few 
years  of  separation  from  his  adored  brother 
in  the  composition  of  two  beautiful  books 
about  their  childhood  and  youth,  A  Small 
Boy  (1913),  and  Notes  of  a  Son  and  Brother 
(1914),  and  a  third  autobiographical  volume 
116 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 


which  is  not  yet  published.  Then  came  the 
European  War,  in  which  he  enlisted  as  a 
spiritual  soldier.  By  innumerable  beautiful 
acts,  by  kindly  visits  to  French  and  Belgian 
refugees  and  wounded  soldiers,  by  gifts  of 
money  and  writings  to  war  charities,  he 
raised  an  altar  to  the  dead  who  had  died  for 
the  countries  which  he  had  always  loved  at 
the  hands  of  the  country  which,  ever  since 
he  was  a  student  at  Bonn,  he  had  always 
loathed.  In  July,  1915,  he  took  the  great 
step,  fraught  for  him  with  the  deepest 
emotions,  of  renouncing  his  American 
citizenship  and  becoming  a  naturalised 
British  subject;  and  in  January,  1916,  he 
did  England  the  further  honour  of  accepting 
the  Order  of  Merit.  And  on  28th  February, 
1916,  he  died,  leaving  the  white  light  of  his 
genius  to  shine  out  for  the  eternal  comfort 
of  the  mind  of  man. 


117 


A    SHOET    BIBLIOGRAPHY    OF    MR 
HENRY  JAMES'   PRINCIPAL  WORKS 

[A  complete  bibliography  of  the  works  of  Mr  James  would 
form  a  much  thicker  volume  than  this  book.  A 
useful  bibliography  up  to  1906,  compiled  by  Mr 
Frederick  Allen  King,  is  included  as  an  appendix  in 
Miss  Elisabeth  Luther  Gary's  The  Novels  of  Henry 
James  (Putnam)  ;  and  a  complete  bibliography 
covering  the  same  period,  which  gives  an  interesting 
list  of  his  early  unsigned  contributions  to  periodicals, 
has  been  compiled  by  Mr  Leroy  Phillips  and  published 
by  Messrs  Constable.  The  following  bibliography 
records  only  the  first  editions  of  publications  in  book 
form.] 

The  American  (Ward,  Lock).     1877. 
French  Poets  and  Novelists  (Macmillan).     1878. 
The  Europeans  (Macmillan}.     1878. 
Roderick  Hudson  (Macmillan).     1879. 
j/ Daisy  Miller.     An  International  Episode.     Four  Meetings 

(Macmillan).     1879. 

l/Tke     Madonna    of    the    Future.     Longstaff's    Marriage. 
Madame  de  Mauves.     Eugene  Pickering.     The  Diary 
of  a  Man  of  Fifty.     Benvolio  (Macmillan).     1879. 
Hawthorne    (Macmillan).     Included   in   English   Men   of 

Letters  Series,  edited  by  John  Morley.     1879. 
Confidence  (Ghatto  &  Windus).     1880. 

•  Washington  Square.     The  Pension  Beaurepas.     A  Bundle 
of  Letters  (Macmillan).     1881. 

119 


HENRY  JAMES 


The  Portrait  of  a  Lady  (Macmillan).     1881. 

Portraits  of  Places  (Macmillan).     1883. 

Tales  of  Throe  Cities  :  The  Impressions  of  a  Cousin.  Lady 
Barbarina.  A  New  England  Winter  (Macmillan). 
1884. 

Stories  Revived:  Vol.  I.  The  Author  of  Beltraffio. 
Pandora.  The  Path  of  Duty.  A  Day  of  Days.  A 
Light  Man.  Vol.  II.  Georgina's  Reasons.  A  Passion- 
ate Pilgrim.  A  Landscape  Painter.  Rose-Agathe. 
Vol.  III.  Poor  Richard.  The  Last  of  the  Valerii. 
Master  Eustace.  The  Romance  of  Certain  Old 
Clothes.  A  Most  Extraordinary  Case  (Macmillan). 
1885. 

The  Bostonians  (Macmillan).     1886. 

The  Princess  Casamassima  (Macmillan).     1886. 

The  Reverberator  (Macmillan).     1888. 

The  Aspern  Papers.  Louisa  Pallant.  The  Modern 
Warning  (Macmillan).  1888. 

Partial  Portraits  (Macmillan).     1888. 

A  London  Life.  The  Patagonia.  The  Liar.  Mrs 
Temperley  (Macmillan).  1889. 

The  Tragic  Muse  (Macmillan).     1890. 

The  Lesson  of  the  Master.  The  Marriages.  The  Pupil. 
Brooksmith.  The  Solution.  Sir  Edmund  Orme 
(Macmillan).  1892. 

The  Real  Thing.  Sir  Dominick  Ferrand.  Nona  Vincent. 
The  Chaperon.  Grevillo  Fane  (Macmillan).  1893. 

The  Private  Life.  The  Wheel  of  Time.  Lord  Beaupr6. 
The  Visits.  Collaboration.  Owen  Wingrave  (Osgood, 
Mcllvaine).  1893. 

Essays  in  London  (Osgood,  Mcllvaine).     1893. 

Theatricals :  Two  Comedies.  Tenants.  Disengaged 
(Osgood,  Mcllvaine).  1894. 

Theatricals :  Second  Series.  The  Album.  The  Repro- 
bate (Osgood,  Mcllvaine).  1895. 

120 


BIBLIOGKAPHY 


Terminations  :  The  Death  of  the  Lion.  The  Coxon  Fund. 
The  Middle  Yeara.  The  Altar  of  the  Dead  (Heine- 
mann).  1895. 

Embarrassments  :  The  Figure  in  the  Carpet.  Glasses.  The 
Next  Time.  The  Way  it  Came  (Heinemann)  1896. 

The  Other  House  (Heinemann).     1896. 

The  Spoils  of  Poynton  (Heinemann).     1897. 

What  Maisie  Knew  (Heinemann).     1897. 

In  the  Cage  (Duckworth).     1898. 

The  Two  Magics.  The  Turn  of  the  Screw.  Covering  End 
(Macmillan).  1898. 

The  Awkward  Age  (Heinemann).     1899. 

The  Soft  Side:  The  Great  Good  Place.  "Europe." 
Paste.  The  Real  Right  Thing.  The  Great  Condition. 
The  Tree  of  Knowledge.  The  Abasement  of  the 
Northmores.  The  Given  Case.  John  Delavoy.  The 
Third  Person.  Maud-Evelyn.  Miss  Gunton  of 
Poughkeepsie  (Methuen).  1900. 

The  Sacred  Fount  (Methuen).     1901. 

The  Wings  of  the  Dove  (Constable).     1902. 

The  Better  Sort:  Broken  Wings.  The  Beldonald  Hol- 
bein. The  Two  Faces.  The  Tone  of  Tune.  The 
Special  Type.  Mrs  Medwin.  Flickerbridge.  The 
Story  in  It.  The  Beast  in  the  Jungle.  The  Birth- 
place. The  Papers  (Methuen).  1903. 

The  Ambassadors  (Methuen).     1903. 

William  Wetmore  Story  and  his  Friends  (Blaclcwood). 
1903. 

The  Golden  Bowl  (Methuen).     1905. 

English  Hours  (Heinemann).     1905. 

The  American  Scene  (Chapman  &  Hall).     1907. 

Italian  Hours  (Heinemann).     1909. 

The  Finer  Grain  :  The  Velvet  Glove.  Mora  Montravers. 
A  Round  of  Visits.  Crapy  Cornelia.  The  Bench  of 
Desolation  (Methuen).  1910. 

121 


HENRY  JAMES 


The  Outory  (Methuen).     1911. 

A  Small  Boy  (Macmillan).     1913. 

Notes  of  a  Son  and  Brother  (Macmillan).     1914. 

Notes  on  Novelists  (Dent).     1914. 

A  Collection  of  Novels  and  Tales  by  Henry  James  was 
published  by  Messrs  Macmillan  in  1883.  This  consisted  of 
reprints  of  The  Portrait  of  a  Lady,  Roderick  Hudson,  The 
American,  Washington  Square,  The  Europeans,  Confidence, 
Madame  de  Mauves,  An  International  Episode,  The 
Pension  Beaurepas,  Daisy  Miller,  Four  Meetings,  Long- 
staff's  Marriage,  Benvolio,  The  Madonna  of  the  Future,  A 
Bundle  of  Letters,  The  Diary  of  a  Man  of  Fifty,  and  Eugene 
Pickering  ;  and  two  stories,  The  Siege  of  London  and  The 
Point  of  View,  which  had  not  before  been  published  in 
England. 

The  New  York  Edition  of  the  Novels  and  Tales  of  Mr 
Henry  James  was  published  by  Messrs  Macmillan  during 
1908-1909.  Each  novel  and  each  volume  of  short  stories 
has  a  critical  preface  by  the  author,  and  each  volume  has 
a  photograph  by  Alvin  Langdon  Coburn  as  frontispiece. 
The  following  is  the  order  : —  ^ 

Vi.  Roderick  Hudson.  2.  TJie  American.  3,  4.  The 
Portrait  of  a  Lady.  5,  6/The  Princess  Casamassima. 
^7,  8.  The  Tragic  Muse.  *0.  The  Awkward  Age.  10.  The 
Spoils  of  Poynton ;  A  London  Life  ;  The  Chaperon. 
11.  What  Maisie  Knew  ;  In  the  Cage  ;  The  Pupil.  12.  The 
Aspern  Papers  ;  The  Turn  of  the  Screw  ;  The  Liar ; 
The  Two  Faces.  13.  The  Reverberator ;  Madame  de 
Mauves  ;  A  Passionate  Pilgrim ;  The  Madonna  of  the 
Future  ;  Louisa  Pallant.  14.  Lady  Barbarina ;  The 
Siege  of  London  ;  An  International  Episode  ;  The  Pension 
Beaurepas  ;  A  Bundle  of  Letters  ;  The  Point  of  View. 
15.  The  Lesson  of  the  Master  ;  The  Death  of  the  Lion ; 
122 


BIBLIOGKAPHY 


The  Next  Time ;  The  Figure  in  the  Carpet ;  The  Coxon 
Fund.  16.  The  Author  of  Beltraffio  ;  The  Middle  Years; 
Greville  Fane  ;  Broken  Wings  ;  The  Tree  of  Knowledge  ; 
The  Abasement  of  the  Northmores ;  The  Great  Good 
Place  ;  Four  Meetings  ;  Paste  ;  Europe  ;  Miss  Gunton 
of  Poughkeepsie  ;  Fordham  Castle.  1  17.  The  Altar  of 
the  Dead  ;  The  Beast  in  the  Jungle  ;  The  Birthplace  ; 
The  Private  Life  ;  Owen  Wingrave  ;  The  Friends  of  the 
Friends  ;  Sir  Edmund  Orme  ;  The  Real  Right  Thing ; 
The  Jolly  Corner  ;  Julia  Bride.  18.  Daisy  Miller  ;  Pan- 
dora ;  The  Patagonia  ;  The  Marriages  ;  The  Real  Thing  ; 
Brooksmith  ;  The  Beldonald  Holbein  ;  The  Story  in  It ; 
Flickerbridge  ;  Mrs  Medwin.  Ai),  20.  The  Ambassadors. 
QAr,  22.  The  Wings  of  the  Dove.  £2,  24.  The  Golden 
Bowl. 

Fordham  Castle,  The  Jolly  Corner  and  Julia  Bride  had 
not  previously  been  published.  All  the  early  works  have 
been  subjected  to  a  revision  which  in  several  cases,  notably 
Daisy  Miller  and  Four  Meetings,  amounts  to  their  ruin. 


123 


AMERICAN  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

[When  the  contents  of  collections  of  short  stories  have 
been  given  in  full  in  the  English  bibliography  they 
are  entered  here  by  their  title  only.] 

A  Passionate  Pilgrim  and  Other  Tales  :  The  Last  of  the 
Valerii.  Eugene  Pickering.  The  Madonna  of  the 
Future.  The  Romance  of  Certain  Old  Clothes. 
Madame  de  Mauves  ( James  R.  Osgood ;  present  pub- 
lisher, Houghton,  Mifflin).  1875. 

Transatlantic  Sketches :  Articles  reprinted  from  The 
Nation,  The  Atlantic  Monthly,  and  The  Galaxy 
(James  R.  Osgood ;  present  publishers,  Houghton, 
Mifflin).  1875. 

Roderick  Hudson  (James  R.  Osgood  ;  present  publisher, 
Houghton,  Mifflin).  1876. 

The  American  (James  R.  Osgood ;  present  publisher, 
Houghton,  Mifflin).  1877. 

Watch  and  Ward  ( Houghton,  Osgood  ;  present  publisher, 
Houghton,  Mifflin).  1878. 

The  Europeans  (Houghton,  Osgood ;  present  publisher, 
Houghton,  Mifflin).  1878. 

Daisy  Miller  (Harper).     1878. 

An  International  Episode  (Harper).     1878. 

Hawthorne  (Harper).     1880. 

The  Diary  of  a  Man  of  Fifty  and  A  Bundle  of  Letters 
(Harper).  1880. 

Confidence  (Houghton,  Osgood ;  present  publisher,  Houghton 
Mifflin).  1880. 

Washington  Square.  Illustrated  by  George  du  Maurier 
(Harper).  1881. 

The  Portrait  of  a  Lady  (Houghton,  Mifflin).     1881. 

124 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Daisy  Miller  :   A  Comedy.     Privately  printed.     1 882. 
The  Siege  of   London,  The  Pension  Beaurepas,  and  The 

Point  of  View  (James  R.  Osgood ;   present  publisher, 

Houghton,  Miffliri).     1883. 
Portraits  of  Places  (James  R.  Osgood  ;  present  publisher, 

Houghton,  Miffliri).     1883. 
Tales  of  Three  Cities  (James  R.  Osgood  ;  present  publisher, 

Houghton,  Mifflin).     1884. 
A   Little   Tour   in   France    (James    R.    Osgood ;    present 

publisher,  Houghton,  Mifflin).     1884. 
The  Author  of  Beltraffio.     Pandora.     Georgina's  Reasons. 

The  Path  of  Duty.     Four  Meetings  (James  R.  Osgood  ; 

present  publisher,  Houghton,  Mifflin).     1885. 
The  Bostonians  (Macmillan).     1886. 
L-  The  Princess  Casamassima  (Macmillan).     1886. 
The  Reverberator  (Macmillan).     1888. 
The  Aspern  Papers  (Macmillan).     1888. 
Partial  Portraits  (Macmillan).     1888. 
A  London  Life  (Macmillan).     1889. 
UThe  Tragic  Muse  (Houghton,  Mifflin).     1890. 
The  Lesson  of  the  Master  (Macmillan).     1892. 
The  Real  Thing  (Macmillan).     1893. 
The  Private  Life.     Lord  Beaupre.     The  Visits  (Harper). 

1893. 
The  Wheel  of  Time.      Collaboration.      Owen  Wingrave 

(Harper).     1893. 

Picture  and  Text.     Essays  on  Art  (Harper).     1893. 
Essays  in  London  (Harper).     1893. 
Theatricals  (Harper).     1894. 
Theatricals  :    Second  Series  (Harper).     1895. 
-    Terminations  (Harper).     1895. 

Embarrassments  (Macmillan).     1896. 
^Tlie  Other  House  (Macmillan).     1896. 
The  Spoils  of  Poynton  (Houghton,  Mifflin).     1897. 
What  Maisie  Knew  (Herbert  8.  Stone).     1897. 
125 


HENRY  JAMES 


In  the  Cage  (Herbert  8.  Stone).     1898. 

The  Two  Magics  (Macmillan).     1898. 

The  Awkward  Age  (Harper).     1899. 

The  Soft  Side  (Macmillan).     1900. 

The  Sacred  Fount  (Scribner's).     1901. 

The  Wings  of  the  Dove  (Scribner's).     1902. 

The  Better  Sort  (Scribner's).     1903. 

The  Ambassadors  (Harper).     1903. 

William  Wetmore  Story  (Houghton,  Mifflin).     1903. 

The  Golden  Bowl  (Scribner's).     1904. 

English  Hours  (Houghton,  Mifflin).     1905. 

The    Question    of    our   Speech.     The    Lesson   of   Balzao 

(Houghton,  Mifflin).     1905. 
The  American  Scene  (Harper).     1907. 
Italian  Hours  (Houghton,  Mifflin).     1909. 
The  Finer  Grain  (Scribner's).     1910. 
The  Outcry  (Scribner's).     1911. 
A  Small  Boy  (Scribner's).     1913. 
Notes  of  a  Son  and  Brother  (Scribner's).     1914. 
Notes  on  Novelists  (Scribner's).     1914. 

The  New  York  Edition  of  the  Novels  and  Tales  of 
Mr  Henry  James  was  published  in  America  by  Messn 
Scribner's  Sons. 


126 


INDEX 

*  Altar  of  the  Dead,  The,  100 

Ambassadors,  The,  108-110 

American  Scene,  The,  115 

American,  The,  38-40 

Aspern  Paper*,  The,  88-89 

Atlantic  Monthly,  The,  21,  24 
^Author  of  Beltraffio,  The,  78-80 

Awkward  Age,  The,  106-107 

Setter  Sort,  The,  106 
Sostonians,  The,  71-72 

Civil  War,  19,  21 
i  Coxon  Fund,  The,  92 
Criticism,  63-71 

Daisy  Miller,  44-48 
^Death  of  the  Lion,  The,  92-93 
Decadent  Movement,  79-84,  90 

Eliot,  George,  22,  82 
Emerson,  10,  72 
Essays  in  London,  66 
European  War,  117 
Europeans,  The,  41-44 

Finer  Grain,  The,  115 

Flaubert,  58,  63,  65-66 

French  literature,  38,  52,  58,  91 

French  Poets  and  Novelists,  37,  64 

Galaxy,  The,  24 

Golden  Bowl,  The,  25,  93,  95,  110-113 

Great  Good  Place,  The,  105 

Hawthorne,  10,  24,  31 
Historic  sense,  60-63 

International  situation,  30-33,  109 
In  the  Cage,  98 

James,  Rev.  Henry,  12-13,  17-19,  114 

Lady  Barbarina,  49 

Lesson  of  the  Master,  The,  92 

127 


HENRY  JAMES 


Little  Tour  in  France,  A,  60-61 
London  Life,  A,  50,  54 

Madame  de  Mauves,  28-30 
Madonna  of  the  Future,  The,  28 
Middle  Years,  The,  92 

Naturalisation,  117 

Next  Time,  The,  92 

New  York  Edition  of,  Novels  and  Tales,  The, 

Notet  of  a  Son  and  Brother,  116 

Notes  on  Novelists,  64 

Other  House,  The,  96 

Outcry,  The,  115 

Pandora,  49 

Partial  Portraits,  67 

Passionate  Pilgrim,  The,  25-27,  61 

Pension  Beaurepas,  The,  48 

Playwriting,  108 

Portrait  of  a  Lady,  The,  67-70 

Princess  Casamassima,  The,  73-78 

Religion,  17-19,  93,  99-101,  105-106 
Reverberator,  The,  50 
Roderick  Hudson,  33-36 
Romance  of  Certain  Old  Clothes,  24 

Sacred  Fount,  The,  107 
Siege  of  London,  The,  48 
Small  Boy,  A,  116 
Spoils  of  Poynton,  The,  97 

Temple,  Mary,  23,  102 
Tragic  Muse,  The,  84,  101 
Turgeniev,  56-59,  91 
Turn  of  the  Screw,  The,  97 

Velasquez,  86 

Ward,  Mrs  Humphry,  66 
Washington  Square,  55-59 
What  Maisie  Knew,  97 
Wings  of  the  Dove,  101,  104 


DATE  DUE 


r?  9 

19iS 

21 

3656 

APR  ic 

196? 

.viAR  3  0  1 

966  S 

MAY     5 

1966 

MAY     5  1! 

™1 

JAN 

5  1971 

DEC     S 

1970  8 

MAR  ° 

T    1W 

MAR4  i 

197t^5 

GAYLORD 

PRINTED  IN  U.S.A. 

UC  SOUTHERN  REGIONAL  LIBRARY  FACILITY 


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AA    001  259  824  9 


